The Lost Preview

Perspective can make all the difference. Take, for example, Irrational Games' last project, System Shock 2 on the PC. Mainstream press called the game a first-person shooter, because superficially it looked a lot like Quake or Half-Life. More correctly, though, SS2 was part of a growing number of games that defy classification, combining elements from various game genres - first-person shooters, platformers, and even role-playing games - to create unique gaming experiences. Irrational Games' latest, The Lost, for the PlayStation 2, is no different. The game's ordinary female hero and supernatural settings make it seem like just another entry into the crowded survival-horror genre. Such a premature judgement is unfair, though, because like Irrational's other efforts, The Lost strives to be much more than an uninspired clone and draws inspiration from platformers and RPGs as much as it does from the latest Resident Evil.

The Lost's storyline is sophisticated and complex. You're Amanda, a medical student struggling to make ends meet. Because you have a young daughter to support, you have to bus tables at a greasy spoon, while trying to keep your grades up. When your boss starts giving you fewer hours, a terrible chain of events is set into motion, culminating in your daughter's accidental death. You slide into an unshakable depression. Spiritually broken and filled with despair, you begin to consider suicide. Then a voice brings you out of the terrible reverie. A supernatural force has heard your silent pleas and has appeared before you, offering you an opportunity to get your daughter back. All you have to do, you learn, is survive an adventure into the bowels of hell to get her.

Accepting the challenge, Amanda begins her dreadful journey. She finds hell, unsurprisingly, a place more terrible than you can imagine. To make matters worse, hell's only purpose has been lost. Instead of serving as the final resting place for the truly unjust, the underworld has also become a graveyard for souls that should rightly be in heaven. Though you enter hell to rescue your daughter, the quest becomes complicated by your conscience, and you eventually conclude that you're obligated to work and free these lost souls.

Irrational Games describes The Lost as an update of the classic novel Dante's Inferno. An update, though, means a lot has changed. For starters, Virgil isn't your guide, and you're obviously no poet. More importantly, though, there's no assurance that you'll escape your journey into the underworld. You'll have to fight tooth and nail and solve lots of horrible puzzles if you plan to make it out in one piece with your daughter in tow. Amanda begins the game as an unspectacular fighter, but you will quickly have to learn how to handle yourself if you hope to last long in hell. You're not totally beholden to Amanda's mortal frame, though. When times are tough, she has supernatural friends to call on for assistance. In the course of your adventures Amanda will be able to assume the formof one of three denizens of hell, Shadow, Light, and Corruption.

These three beings each possess specific traits that allow for a popular puzzle-solving dynamic to make its way into The Lost. Light, for example, can counteract many of hell's poisonous effects with a healing influence. Corruption, on the other hand, is a magical creature, full of sin, who's most useful when you need to fight hellfire with hellfire. Shadow is the dark median between Light and Corruption, and he uses his stealth as a cloak to avoid conflict with hell's demons. The three creatures exert a subtle effect on Amanda too, and because each character can solve the game's challenges through his or her own methods, you may find yourself spending a predominant amount of time in one particular form. This has an intriguing side effect, though. If you give too much time to just one of the supernatural forms, you'll soon find that Amanda's natural characteristics mimic those of your demon associates. Irrational hopes that this encourages you to play equally with all three numinous beings, not just your personal favorite.

It's been said that hell is what you make it. Irrational has taken this idea to heart in its design of hell, creating it as Amanda conceives it. You can toss out preconceptions of little red devils, hellfire, and brimstone and instead expect levels like Las Vegas and nameless World War I-type battlefields strewn with bloodied corpses. To pull it all off, Irrational has licensed Monolith's LithTech 3D engine. The engine, originally written for first-person shooters, has been significantly modified for The Lost to accommodate a third-person action-adventure game. Like most console platformers, The Lost features a totally customizable camera that spins, zooms, and pans in a variety of directions. With the PlayStation 2, draw distances are of no concern to Irrational, and the development studio has promised a variety of locales in the game. Character models are intricately detailed too, each featuring over 10,000 polys with facial animations and complex skeletons allowing for a wide range of realistic movement.

The Lost has the markings of an inspired effort. Take a modern-day update of a classic story, couple it with a developer that has a sterling PC pedigree, top it off with a powerful console and graphics engine, and you have all the trappings for an excellent game. While critics may claim that The Lost is a combination of survival-horror, platformer, and role-playing games gone before, they'd be missing the obvious signs of originality in this hefty amalgamation that could very well end up to be more than the sum of its parts. Look for The Lost on the PlayStation 2 in the third quarter of 2001.