When you close the log — girl gone. Where’d she go? She hasn’t gone far, and when you catch up to her, your first fuzzy memory kicks in while you babble something about ghosts. After the memory ends, you’ll return to the jungle, but no girl. (Welcome to The Island.) As you continue toward the sunlight, however, you’ll come upon Kate. This is the first place where a dialogue options box actually appears. You have the ability to ask characters specific questions that either directly relate to the quest you’re on or about the crash and its survivors in general. This function allows you to stay on target for where you are in the story without wasting too much time on superfluous investigation. Kate’s no help, but she hands you a bottle of water and sends you on your way. This triggers your next memory flash. “Is she hiding something from me?” (Of course she is; she’s Kate.)

The Help section of the journal opens. It informs you about flashbacks and how to take pictures during them. By using the “remember” option, you can replay a flashback and scan it for clues about the past. You need to photograph Kate boarding the plane with her marshal in tow, and this will take some coordination of the “camera,” but this isn’t made entirely clear, so there will be quite a bit of trial and error involved until you figure out exactly what it is you need to “photograph” with your mind’s camera. Keep trying until you get the exact shot you need. (You won’t be able to continue and the memory will just keep repeating until you do.) When you finally get the picture, you’ll remember that Kate is a fugitive and that she passed by you when she boarded the plane. Still within the memory, you’ll have the option of speaking to the flight attendant and gathering further information, which only includes her offer to stow your real camera and laptop. The memory ends, and you get to confront Kate about her fugitive status, but instead of getting offended like the real Kate would, she simply tells you to follow a dog to find the crash site at the beach.

Some of the puzzles require a fair bit of deductive reasoning, so it’s good for a brain bender challenge, but Lost: Via Domus feels more geared toward tweens than teens and adults. Many of the problems you’ll have to solve involve number and letter sequence patterns like those found on standard IQ tests. There are goodies to be collected (mostly water bottles and coconuts) that have cash value for trade. There are definite, though often not clearly marked, boundaries. You can’t enter the ocean past your ankles, for example, and venturing off of a designated path will often run you into impassable obstacles.

I’m not into spoiling people, so I won’t tell you how the game ends, but as a devout Lost junkie — mighty disappointed. Just remember how much you paid for that big screen before you throw something at it. If they were to do that with the actual show – riots would break out around the world.