Lost Horizon

This game is sort of hidden gem that not many people played or even heard of but apparently almost everyone who did loved or at least liked it very much. It was no different with me who learned about it's existence accidentally in year 2022 and was convinced by exceptionally good opinions and low price to try it out. It's not easy to explain what's so good about it because on paper it certainly doesn't look like anything extraordinary. LH is traditional point and click adventure with absolutely nothing original or groundbreaking. "Indianajonesy" story is entertaining and even has some decent twists. Characters are very stereotypical and not particularly likeable nor interesting. Main protagonist is some silly always cool and ever joking British rascal. He has counterpart in the person of his clever and sensible Asian not-girlfriend which sadly got little screen time. And main antagonist is very cliche Nazi countess. And yet there is some irresistible charm in all this. Scope of the story is pretty big and includes many diverse locations suitable for grand adventure like: Himalayan mountains, African town, Berlin during Olympics, castle on German countryside and jungle. Gameplay mechanics are very traditional and based mostly on inventory puzzles. On rare occasions we have to cooperate between two characters which gets especially interesting in the endgame stage with kind of butterfly effect gimmick. In contrast to plot constantly implying urgency of situation, the game itself is very laid back. It's impossible to die, run out of time or otherwise screw things up here even when it would seem natural, which makes playing LH very relaxing and pleasant experience. Especially combined with not too high difficulty. Not often adventure games give me such frustration-free time. Balance is pretty much perfect here, every once in a while I had to slow down to figure things out but never to the very common in this genre point of frustration or necessity to use walkthrough.

Have played chapter 1 only and so far it is a really good classic game. Love the dialog, scene's and characters so far. Only problem i had was that the cutscenes where cropped on the side. i fixed this by playing the game in window mode and to get that working you need to open de game dir and start the configTool.exe and there you can change some setting's which are not available ingame.

Very nice production and story, great graphics and details everywhere, and nice music and ambient sounds. Lots of different locations to explore. As opposed to many other adventures out there, this one has very good puzzles! Not as in extremely hard, but they are clever and fun and you have a chance of actually solving them yourself. And there are loads of real puzzles, loads and loads! But you'll never feel "oh no, not another one, I just want to go on in the story", cause the puzzles are really good and varied. I only needed some help from a walkthrough on the very last chapter. Very streamlined interface, and moving between areas are quick. The downside must be the vioceacting, but since everything else is so good I didn't mind it much.

I think the production values are quite good. I liked the Indy-movie style music and it doesn't look ugly, some humor sprinkled here and there. That said, the story was emotionally flat, it was just a backdrop to classic point and click adventure puzzles. The puzzles were pretty much okay, nothing outlandish. Game is split into several chapters and each one is appropriately bite sized. Every chapter starts with a clean inventory so it's always a great place to stop, you don't have to remember anything.

This is a very fine example of how a point&click adventure should work: there are no quick time elements that force you to react in a split of a second, and even when the character says you should hurry up, e.g. because the bad guys are coming, you don't need to hurry at all, you still will have all the time in the world to finish that scene! Furthermore, there is no need for senseless travelling around the world because you forget to take an item in one city. Every thing and all the objects you need are always to be found within the scene or the chapter you're actually in. The graphics are stunning, even thought they are from 13 years ago! And you don't need a high end video card to get to see those stunning graphics either! I played this game on Linux with the help of Wine, using an onboard graphic card, and I did not face any difficulty whatsoever, and I never had the feeling that the graphics are poor. A specially delighting scene to me was the chapter in Germany at the Wewelsburg in Büren, a castle in the shape of a triangle(!) near Paderborn. I used to live next to that town, and I can tell you that the makers of this game did a dammed good job when they did their research for this game and gathered information about that place. Both the outside scenery and the interior are very precisely reflected! Absolute superior work! :) If I could, I would give 6 stars to this game!