It’s hard to tell which is worse, a bad game made out of a good media property, or a bad media property made from a good game but Ubisoft and Ubisoft Montreal are clearly trying to tilt the scales towards the former with the release of Lost: Via Domus, an adventure game based on the hit show. While the look and feel of various island locations are faithfully reproduced, the bland game play and horrible voice acting make this game not up to the task of carrying on the impressive pedigree of the show.

You play as Elliot Maslow, a photographer who survives the crash of Oceanic 815 minus his memory. At first, all Elliot knows is that he’s being haunted by visions of a strange woman and that someone wants to kill him. Throughout the game you’ll lead Elliott to various parts of the island and recover his memory via the show’s flashback mechanism. If you’re wondering how well introducing a brand new character on the island works, you need only remember Nikki and Paulo and you’ll have your answer.

The game is labeled as an adventure game, and sticks fairly closely to the adventure game conventions. Despite being in a three dimensional world your ability to explore the island is limited by plane wreckage or dense jungle foliage or the toughest navigational adversary of all, ankle deep water. At any given time, Elliot has a quest that usually consists of you going to talk to someone and then heading off into the jungle to find something.

Talking to your fellow islanders is an exercise in tedium due to the absolutely horrible voice acting employed in the game. Ben, Desmond, Claire, Mikhail, Sun and Tom are all voiced by the actors who portray them on the show, which is great, except for the fact that most of these conversations consist of maybe one or two lines. Sun’s entire dialog tree is one sentence in Korean, which makes one wonder why they needed the original actress for such a thrilling exchange. The folks you talk to most, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Sayid, Michael, Charlie and Hurley have voices ranging from serviceable to abysmal with Locke sounding like some 1840’s prospector and Jack sounding like a nasally whiner. Luckily most quests don’t require you to talk to more than one person, so once you’ve gotten the tidbit of information you need, you can move on to your quest.

Exploring the jungle brings you to one of the game’s core game play elements, which is walking aimlessly through foliage while you’re either a) shot at by the Others or b) stalked by the black smoke monster. Navigating through the jungle consists of finding markers which in turn points you to the next marker on the path. When you’re being shot at by the Others, it’s fairly simple to get out alive as you can just run full tilt to each marker, however when being chased by the black smoke monster, what should be an intense and harrowing experience turns out to be a frustrating mess. As the monster approaches you can hide in a grove of bamboo trees, wait for your heartbeat to calm down and the monster to leave and then exit the grove. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell your orientation once you leave the grove, which makes finding the next marker difficult. Add to this the extremely wide collision detection area for the grove of trees, which means that as you shift your viewpoint to try and find the next flag, you’ll brush up against the trees, wind up in them and then have to exit and find the marker all over again. Usually by the time you do find the marker, Ol’ Smokey has returned, meaning it’s back in the trees with you.

It’s not all jungle exploring though. Sometimes you get to explore caves. While in the caves you have to make sure your light source stays lit as running around in the dark causes Elliot to have a fatal heart attack, or fall down a pit and die. While dying from falling in a pit is plausible, the notion that this award winning war zone photojournalist could die from a profound case of the heebie-jeebies is downright silly.

It would seem that Elliot is not only a photographer but a master electrician as he is often tasked with repairing electrical panels to get certain parts of the various stations to work. As you explore the stations you find fuses which you use in the puzzles to reduce the voltage level from 100v to whatever is required to open up or activate whatever is currently closed or off. The puzzles can be challenging, however simple trial and error will usually win the day. The frustration comes from realizing that you don’t have the fuse you need which then requires you to further explore the locale searching for the right part. Thankfully, for most of the game you can pull out the used fuses once you’ve solved the puzzle and keep them for later puzzles.