Even when you keep your eyes focused exclusively on the next objective, it’s hard not to feel like you’re constantly treading over the same ground. There are essentially three puzzles in the game that repeat ad nauseum. There are fuse puzzles, requiring you to get a certain amount of voltage from one end of a panel to the other. There are “IQ Test” puzzles, where you have to determine the next item in a sequence like “1 – 2 – 4 – 8 – 16 –” (that’s not one of the tests in the game, but they are that simple). And finally there are the photo puzzles that begin each flashback, where you start with a torn-up picture, then watch an eternally-looping memory while trying to identify the moment the picture represents. If the puzzles were harder to solve, it might be more annoying, but given that you can breeze through most of them within a few minutes, it doesn’t slow things down that much.

What could slow you down if you invest too much importance in it is the island’s barter system. From bottles of water to coconuts to the extremely valuable Apollo Bars, your inventory will constantly be full of trivial items saved for trading with the other castaways. You trade for light sources to help you through the game’s three pitch black areas, you trade for a gun and bullets (but as I said earlier, you don’t need the extra bullets), and you trade for more fuses (which you also don’t need, as they’re in abundance). Once you buy a lantern, a couple cans of oil, and the gun, you’re completely set, though you’ll continue to find way more tradeable items than you could possibly want. Honestly, you could even get by without the lantern, but it undeniably makes things a lot easier. Either way, once you’ve traded for the above items, you can feel free to stop picking up every can of Dharma-brand beer you find—you won’t use them.

The free-roaming controls naturally vary according to which system you play on, as Lost was released for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The console versions are simple and intuitive to anyone who’s played other third-person “action”-style games, using the left analog stick to move and the right stick to look around. The PC version handles just as smoothly using a standard mouse and keyboard combination, though you'll want to reconfigure the default settings for some of the secondary actions. Regardless of platform, however, navigating your character around the full 3D environments island is a breeze.

Whether a matter of budget, time, or willingness on behalf of the talent, very few of the actors from the TV series took part in this little side project, with the majority of the characters being voiced by sound-alikes of varying quality. One wishes the developers had determined up front which actors would be available for voice work and written the storyline around them, as those few who actually participated—including Claire, Sun, Desmond, and Ben—only have 3 to 5 minutes of dialogue each. Meanwhile, characters like Locke, who sounds like nothing so much as a buddy who thinks he does a great Locke impression and you don’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him otherwise, and Kate, who reads lines even flatter than the real actress, dominate the game’s “screen time” as much as they do the show’s.

You won’t find as many flaws in the rest of the game’s presentation. The graphics for each character model are done well (except for a super creepy Hurley) and make everyone you speak with easily recognizable. The settings look like they were carefully copied over from the TV show, including a fully-equipped hatch and the various huts and lean-tos occupying the beach (that increase in sophistication as the weeks pass). The screen even displays little prompts any time a particular button is required to look at or interact with an object. The sounds and music are pitch-perfect, from the smoke monster’s theme to the special sound at the end of each episode when you’ve just gotten some crazy revelation and it cuts to the black-and-white Lost logo.

In a title like this, which is more fan service than anything else, it’s those little touches that make all the difference. Each episode even begins with a neat “Previously on Lost” montage where it shows relevant clips of the game up to that point. If it weren’t for all the cool references to the series and the Lost-worthy storyline, it would be hard to justify even spending the 4 to 6 hours it takes to stroll through the easy, repetitive puzzles and mostly non-interactive scenery. If you’re a regular viewer of the show, and you can find it at a decent price, I can easily recommend booking a seat on Oceanic Flight 815. For everyone else, however, even this brief visit to Lost island just might seem more like an eternity in purgatory.