Every so often, a game
comes along that has both so many good things going for it and
so much that is wrong with it that a coherent and
definitive review is nearly impossible. Usually, such mixed reviews
are reserved for games from Arxel Tribe, developers of such wonderfully
idiosyncratic messes as 7 Games of the Soul, Ring and the stylish
but virtually unplayable Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Final Cut.

The wary gamer might do
best to think of Coktel’s classic
Lost in Time as an early progenitor of an Arxel Tribe game. The plot
is so convoluted as to be senseless and impossible to follow. But
the style and puzzle content generally make the game worth the effort.

Lost in Time follows the
adventures of Doralice Prunelier, a rare (for the time) female
protagonist. The game begins with Doralice
swimming to consciousness in the hold of an old wooden sailing ship.
After some exploration, Doralice discovers a fellow captive who clues
her in to the fact that she is no longer in the year 1992, but has
somehow been transported a hundred or so years into the past. She
eventually discovers that the ship belongs to a criminal time hopper
from the future. A “time cop” who has conveniently stowed
away aboard the ship enlists your aid to help bring the renegade
time hopper to justice and, incidentally, help prevent him from screwing
up your own family’s history. Part of the game’s unique
charm lies in the fact that the vast majority of the game is played
in the past, thus allowing the chapter that takes place in 1992 to
be presented as a flashback. It is your/Doralice’s duty to
uncover the mystery of just why she and the ship’s other prisoner
have been taken captive and assure that her grandfather survives
to actually become her grandfather.

Or something like that.

The plot becomes an incomprehensible
mishmash during Chapter Three, where it is revealed that Somebody
stole Somebody Else’s wife,
but then she had a baby by So-And-So, but her new husband didn’t
care because he was really only after the Treasure of Whatever, which
is some Radioactive Thing that will screw up time traveling. Then,
there is a side plot about two shamans who Doralice has to make fall
in love so that she can gain access to the household of (depending
on which version of the story you choose to believe) her mother or
great-grandmother.

My advice is the same as it was for Ring. Forget the plot. Play
the game for the style and puzzling.

ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY

Your first puzzle in Lost
in Time is getting the game to play. Although
it will install under Win95/98, I was unable to get it to actually
play that way. Many trials and tribulations finally convinced me
that this was because the game had a problem with my integrated SiS
sound system. Even following the advice on various sites instructing
me how to get LIT to operate in a DOS window ended up with it freezing
at the end of the introductory cutscene. However, the game ran perfectly
fine when I broke down and ran it in DOS. For those of you who are
using WinXP, I highly recommend downloading DOSbox before attempting
to play LIT. You will also have more luck if you choose the AdLib
soundcard during the setup, regardless of the soundcard or motherboard
you actually have.

The graphics are an incredibly
odd mix. LIT is presented in the now-traditional 2D-1st-person-perspective-slideshow
format. For the
great majority of the game, the graphics are rendered static drawings
with occasional bits of animation. The quality is somewhere between
Gabriel Knight and The Journeyman Project. (It is hard to believe,
sometimes, that Myst came out only a year later.) Clicking on an
object performs whatever action you need, whether examining it, moving
it or “using” it. Sometimes clicking on an item will
bring up a small inset “close-up” window, allowing a
more detailed examination while leaving the main view in the background.
The real strangeness comes in Chapter Two, when Doralice is in the “present.” This
chapter is presented in primitive Full Motion Video. The main views
are static FMV “photographs,” while the close-up insets
are full FMV, showing (for example) Doralice’s hands pulling
a battery out of a tractor while the larger main view shows the static
photo of the tractor itself. The conversational cutscenes are also
presented in FMV, with the speaking actor set against a blurred white
background and no lip-synching even attempted. The designers avoided
the lip-synch problem during Doralice’s speeches by only showing
her face from the bridge of the nose up.

Somehow, despite your
never getting a look at her face, the combination of repetitive
close-ups of her eyes and grainy FMV videos of her
body manage to make Doralice one of the most attractive and sexy
female protagonists in adventure gaming. I guess the old adage is
right… it’s what you don’t see.

The interface is a generally intuitive straight point-and-click.
However, given that so much of the game depends upon combining inventory
items, this portion of the interface is unnecessarily clunky. Rather
than selecting an item and drag/clicking it directly onto another
in your inventory, the inventory window closes once you select an
item, with your cursor now replaced by the item icon. You must re-open
your inventory window a second time to combine that icon with another
item. Since my copy of the game came without a manual, this took
me quite awhile to discover on my own, thus making the first part
of the game frustrating in the extreme.

MacGyver Lives

As with most adventure
games of its era, the real emphasis of Lost in Time is on its puzzles.
Once again, we are offered an inconsistent
mix. Most all of the puzzling is inventory-based. Doralice is no
moron, possessing a smattering of knowledge of physics and chemistry.
The majority of puzzles require you to combine and use everyday objects
in unconventional ways, often making use of this knowledge. For the
most part, I found the puzzles to be tough but fair. In fact, most
of them were a delight, really putting my brain to the test about
how I could combine the items at hand to produce the desired result.
Often I had to reuse items in a variety of ways. But every so often,
I ran across a puzzle that flew in the face of all the scientific
logic of the rest of the game. (SPOILER AHEAD!) For instance, would
even a professional chemist know that by combining paint thinner
and sea salts he can create a gas that will first make a parrot sick,
then make it hungry? This bit of weirdness seemed to come straight
out of a Chem101 class at Wassamatta U. I also found myself stymied
when confronted with the impossibility of “plexiglass” I
could fold like paper; perhaps the word means something different
in its original French. There were a few instances in which I had
to resort to the old “try using/combining every item in the
inventory” trick.

Then there was the problem
with searching desks, drawers, wardrobes, boxes and other containers.
Whenever you click on such an object,
you get to see a close-up view of the drawer/box/etc. in question
and see the found object within it. However….. what you don’t
know (unless you are lucky enough to find a copy of the game that
includes the manual) is that you must search the drawer/box/etc.
again and again to see if there are any more items in it that weren’t
revealed during the first examination.

The combination of having
left behind items because I didn’t
search a drawer enough times and having to use inventory items in
completely nonsensical ways in what was otherwise a very logical
puzzle-based game proved exasperating at times. Yet, overall, the
puzzling was several cuts above any game in recent years. If I ever
found myself suddenly trapped in the hold of a 19th Century ship,
Doralice is exactly the person I’d want at my side!

Not Bad For A Chick Flick

Overall, I have to give
Lost in Time a thumbs-up. It was ahead of its time in many ways:
the use of FMV, the choice of a female protagonist,
and the convoluted Dickens-meets-Bronte-meets-Verne romantic plot.
Despite the truly horrid acting of the rest of the cast, Doralice’s
perky British lilt was generally on target and kept me interested
through even the most tedious and ridiculous bits of exposition.
The MacGyver-like puzzles truly shine, despite the occasional bit
of illogic. The puzzling joys outnumbered the drawback of the sappy
and incomprehensible storyline. However… I highly recommend
that if you go looking for a copy of Lost in Time that you make sure
to purchase a copy that includes the manual. You’ll save yourself
an Excedrin headache.

Final Grade: B

System Requirements:

• 286/16 (386 recommended)
• 640K RAM
• VGA
• Soundcard
• CD-ROM
  Drive