Review: Lost Civilization

Lost Civilization is categorized on Steam as “Adventure,” “Casual,” or “Point and Click.” I’m not sure about the first one, but it is definitely the second two. Personally I think of adventure games as more akin to Tomb Raider, but I guess in the sense that the storyline takes you on an adventure, it could be considered an adventure game.

The game has three difficulty settings casual, normal, and expert. The first two are basically the same, but the time between hints is longer on the normal setting. In the expert setting the interactive zones are not highlighted like they are in casual and normal. I played on normal.

I had some trouble right off the bat. The game didn’t like my widescreen monitors (events since then have led me to believe it’s my computer, not the game). The picture was partially off the screen, so I had to play in window mode. Luckily that ended up being the only glitch I ran into.

You start the game in your office, doing paper work, when you get a call from your uncle. Your fiancé, Michael, is helping him with a research project and they need your help. You agree, but your fiancé doesn’t meet you at the appointed place and time. The adventure part of the game is figuring out what your uncle and fiancé were researching, so that you can find Michael.

The game was a mix of puzzles and seek-and-find, which is nice since straight seek-and-find gets boring and straight puzzle games are sometimes frustratingly difficult. None of the puzzles were too difficult, although some of them did throw me for a loop for a short while.

One of the things that throw me for a loop was the “items to place” activity. I saw the screen and thought “seek and find.” It took me a minute or so of not finding anything on the list before I reread the directions and realized I was suppose to figure out where to put the items pictured in the inventory area.