Lost in Space: The First Adventure

• Previews by Serena Nelson
• Published:

“Danger, Will Robinson!” Anyone who knows anything about the classic 1960s sci-fi TV series Lost in Space (or even the 1998 movie or 2018 reboot) will instantly recognize Robot’s iconic phrase. Now adventure game fans have been invited to play in the sandbox that is the Robinsons’ home of Jupiter 2. Or start to, anyway. Lost in Space: The First Adventure places us in the shoes of young Will as he finds himself on a whole new adventure, albeit quite a short one. That is to say, an unfinished one as this is just the first part in an episodic series featuring Will, Robot, and Dr. Zachary Smith. And for the most part, just these three characters, at least so far. There isn’t even much of a story established yet, with very little to do here except solve puzzles.

In keeping with the format of the television show, the game starts out with the Robinson family having landed their Jupiter 2 spaceship on an unknown planet. This world, of which we learn very little, has sparse vegetation but a lot of sand. There are remnants of a long-lost civilization, but other than that there’s no sign of life, previous or current. Nine-year-old Will, as is the wont of a youth his age, goes exploring and finds a cave, which prompts his father to forbid him to enter. So what does he do? Of course he sneaks out in the middle of the night, turning off the force field generator protecting the ship as he does so. Obviously, this won’t end well. 

Right after entering the cave, an earthquake causes a boulder to fall, trapping Will inside. This is where we get a sort of tutorial of how Lost in Space plays out. Either the gamepad thumbstick or WASD keys are used to move Will around, and the mouse to interact. (A controller is recommended, even in the PC version.) This is a free-roaming experience, and we can pick up objects, combine some with other acquired items, use them in the environment, following most of the usual classic adventure game conventions. This segment requires trial-and-error as you’ll have to use Will’s rock analyzer to explode, melt, or freeze crystals of varying colors to destroy the boulder so he can leave the cave.

After making it back to the Jupiter 2, Will finds that his entire family is missing and that Robot is disabled. Or, more accurately, his battery has gone missing. Rummaging through the detritus strewn about, you’ll make it back inside to power up Robot and get into the bowels of the ship. Here you’ll meet up with the nefarious Dr. Smith – the man who, in the TV show, is responsible for stranding the Robinsons in space in the first place, unwittingly getting himself dragged along in the process. Not surprisingly, he has locked himself up in his quarters like the coward that he is. The good doctor does absolutely nothing to help the young lad.

When you finally set off in search of Will’s missing family, you’ll discover some ruins and spot footprints tracking in multiple directions. At this point, you’ll need to do what you can to open three locked gates that close just as Will enters the area, leaving you to figure out how to unlock them. You’ll perform tasks like fixing a cart with a missing wheel, and finding a way to raise a wooden lift. Up to this point, the majority of the puzzles have been fairly straightforward, involving a lot of inventory use to move forward. But here is where the fun ended for me.

I’ll freely admit that I’m not a fan of environmental puzzles, and The First Adventure is full of them, particularly in the second half. Robot and Dr. Smith will eventually join Will in his quest, but they’re really only there to pad out the game by having each take their own individual path to get all three characters through. Pretty much every screen from this point on represents one of only a handful of button-pushing puzzles, requiring you to position characters on platforms that will rise when Robot pushes a button on the ground. This allows Will and Dr. Smith to push buttons higher up. 

Then we get to have fun with movement puzzles. These are purely memory mini-games in which you have to move Will and Dr. Smith around to form patterns of rocks in the ground that emerge under their feet. Mess up and you’re back to square one and have to start all over again. This is a good time to map out on paper where to move each character. The sequence starts out with just Will doing the walking before Smith is brought in to help out, but afterwards you’ve got to figure out which person goes where and when, which can be frustrating for the impatient. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no successful strategy for planning your movements in advance. You simply have to brute force the solution through trial-and-error, and it can take some time to figure out the patterns. 

Lost in Space: The First Adventure

Genre:	Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Adaptation, Other worlds/dimensions, Rescue, Team-up
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Illustrated realism
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click

After making it to yet another gate, you must try to open it by turning wheels clockwise or counterclockwise in the proper sequence so you can move forward to the next almost identical screen. Doing a step wrong again takes you back to the start of this memory game. Here too it is a good idea to keep track of which direction the wheels are to be turned, and in what order. This segment is pretty tame at first, as the first areas only have one wheel to deal with. Later on, though, you’ll have to worry about two and even three at a time. Again, not for those without patience. I’ll readily admit that all of this repetition bored me to tears.

Thankfully not all of the puzzles are as monotonous as this; it’s just that a large portion of The First Adventure is more of the same. Earlier in the game the puzzles are more interesting. One of my favorites involves turning tiles to get power flowing through a wall panel. There are also lever puzzles, which are memory games too but at least they’re different, as well as wire puzzles where you have to route one end of a wire to the related end of a circuit board correctly. It’s just a shame that the variety couldn’t have been more evenly spaced out.

All that said, there are a couple features that can help players out tremendously here. The first is a hint system that allows you to get clues on your current task at hand. This can be useful, but I rarely found myself needing to consult it during the classic “point-and-click” segments. The other sanity-saving grace is the fact that most of the logic puzzles can be skipped. This saved me a lot of headaches, and time, by letting me bypass them altogether. I’m not so proud to say that I used this quite liberally towards the end of the episode.

Despite the puzzle-centric nature of this debut installment, it does feel like an extension of the series it’s based on. The voice acting is top-notch, and the characters actually sound like the actors from the 1960s. Particularly Dr. Smith, perhaps the most iconic voice on the show other than Robot. That said, developer Scary Robot did use AI tools to digitally alter one of the voices, which I suspect was Robot to make him seem sufficiently mechanical (though he still sounds largely human). The music and audio effects could have come right out of a 1960s science-fiction television series. The artwork is more cartoonish than I would have liked, but at least everyone looks like their TV counterparts. In all, the ambience feels genuine, even if the puzzles seem more tacked on than a natural extension of the show.

The ending to this “first adventure” closes out rather abruptly. We find clues that hint at the family being kidnapped, which makes Will conclude that they were abducted by various enemies the Robinsons previously encountered, so it’s up to our three intrepid heroes to continue following their trail. This, along with several screenshots that clearly take place further along, leads me to believe that future episodes will be much more entertaining and engaging. I am actually interested in continuing the story to see where it all leads, but this short experience certainly left me wanting more in its own right.

It's far too early to give this game a review score, as it’s nothing but a very short introductory installment for now, stretched out only by its tedious later puzzles. It’s just the first part of a planned five-episode series, but many game episodes last longer than the scant two hours I put into this one, even if I did skip several of the more tiresome puzzles. There isn't much of a plot beyond the fact that most of the family has gone missing. I’ll admit that I haven't seem a lot of the original series, and while it certainly isn’t necessary, there are references to things that happened before that only those familiar with the show will find meaningful. But whether a longtime fan or series newcomer, there’s very little to base an opinion on from this opening episode alone. With solid production values, it looks like Lost in Space could hopefully become an engaging series in time, but for now there’s really not much indication of where this game is going.