Lost on Cow Island review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Those who don’t enjoy moon logic will have plenty of beefs with this brutally beautiful throwback

Often I hear people say that modern adventure games are too easy. They call them walking simulators or visual novels; you simply click through the narratives to see the stories unfold almost automatically. There's too much handholding, and any obstacles you do face leave the necessary items for getting past them conveniently close at hand for a quick and easy grab. They are practically devoid of puzzle challenge, and playing these games requires no genuine thinking anymore.

It’s indeed true that many new games are easy, but there still are some games being made in the style of the 80s and 90s, complete with all their inherent frustrations. Games with loads of inventory items you don't know what to do with, scattered around plenty of different locations to explore while figuring out their importance. For better or worse, depending on your nostalgic fondness for hair-pulling puzzles, developer Tessier/Ashpool has made just such a game with Lost on Cow Island.

Getting stuck on an island inhabited by sentient cows sounds like fun. Starting from a premise that is very much inspired by Back to the Future – time travel gone awry, an eccentric (if slightly differently spelled) inventor, an alternate mode of transportation, and even some very similar lines of dialogue – Lost on Cow Island quickly turns into a deliberately absurd, extremely difficult experience with crazy, barely clued (if at all) inventory puzzles. The soothing vacation-style music, awesome voice acting and beautifully painted backgrounds make it fun to roam around, but the gameplay experience definitely milks its unapologetic mooooo-n logic for everything it’s worth.

You play as Julius Templeton, who wakes up on a beach. In a cave nearby, his friend Doc Braun is fixing up their crashed time machine, a Volkswagen van. After all, “if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it as cheap as possible?” The vehicle correctly appeared in this particular time and place in the past… but got stranded three hundred yards in the air. Finally, a time-travel story taking into account the Earth constantly moving through space as well, so it’s actually a miracle they arrived as close to their destination as they did.

It’s a shame that we never see the start of their journey. Who are these two men, where did they come from, and what exactly went wrong to get them stranded here? The game immediately starts with Mart– I mean, Julius regaining consciousness after the van has already crashed. It felt to me like the opening cinematic of Lost on Cow Island was completely missing. I’m all for starting a story as close to the action as possible, but it’s not presented as a mystery to be unraveled, so a little bit of exposition could have gone a long way.

The Doc is missing loads of parts to get the van back in working order, so it’s your job to scour the island for them. This shopping list, if you will, is handily displayed via slightly faded icons at the top of your screen. Once you have located a piece – and sometimes fixed it again – its related icon is fully filled in.

Exploring the island is done in familiar point-and-click fashion, though it does have its peculiarities. You can right-click or use the mouse wheel to cycle the cursor through three actions: look, pick up/use, and talk to. When hovered over hotspots, the cursors themselves will show when these actions can be applied. The eye, for example, will remain closed if you can’t examine something – which is a pretty weird restriction. At least the hotspots glow a little bit and are labeled, so you’ll know what exactly you’re looking at.

What bothered me more was the lack of exit signs. You just have to assume that an unobstructed area at the edge of the screen will lead to a new one, and that roads disappearing between the trees will take you to another location. But sometimes I expected Julius to be able to walk somewhere until a whole bunch of clicking proved otherwise. In some places with two exits close together, he would often use the wrong one as well. Moving around isn’t that intuitive to begin with, since there is no walk icon. You have to use one of the other cursors to guide Julius around, but then it’s easy to accidentally trigger a neighboring hotspot.

Actually acquiring the missing car pieces will prove to be a gargantuan task. The inventory puzzles are very tricky and there are no real clues toward possible solutions. Sometimes it feels like the game’s solo developer expects the player to read his mind. To give one very spoilery but very small example: You find a broken lightbulb, but there is never an indication that you need a lightbulb anywhere. When you find a book with blank pages, like a good adventurer you will probably assume there might be hidden messages in it, so you’ll try to find a way to uncover them. Perhaps the more experienced gamer might think of a blacklight, but there is no clue that the broken lightbulb is a blacklight. In any case, the way to fix the lightbulb is to literally plant it somewhere and let it grow whole again. No joke. Cow Island has some really fertile soil; must be something in the milk… Then, once you’ve dug up your regrown bulb but not even inserted it into any lamp, it will suddenly start glowing on its own – but only in one particular location, and you’ll only notice if you happen to open up your inventory, and still only reveal writing if you then happen to check the book with blank pages.

This will definitely quench the thirst of those hardcore adventurers pining for more challenge in their games. But it will surely turn off at least as many as it appeals to, as it’s often very hard to deduce what you are supposed to be doing. During my first half hour of playing through just the first three screens, I had to resort to brute forcing a solution in order to make any progress at all. Even in hindsight, I don’t know how the solution of getting past that first obstacle – a quicksand pit – actually works, or how one would determine that the relevant inventory item possessed the necessary characteristics. Thankfully, the developer has provided a complete walkthrough of the game, which in this case is almost a necessity if you ever want to finish it.

You open up your inventory by clicking the knapsack icon at the top of the screen, but actually selecting an item there is done by right-clicking it. This was very counterintuitive to me, and I kept selecting items every time I just wanted to examine them. I also noticed that sometimes there was a set order for combining items. For instance, I had to pry something out of an object with a knife. Using said object on the knife didn’t do the job. Instead, I had to select the knife first, then use that on the object. So in situations where you’re completely stuck and decide to use everything on everything in the hopes of triggering progress, you might have to try everything in reverse as well.

Lost on Cow Island

Genre:	Comedy, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Escape, Time travel, Animal
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

Sometimes you can’t even do anything with an item until you have talked to a particular character, giving Julius a reason for that action. For instance, I found an apple, and since I was already carrying a knife, I tried to slice it up. Julius refused. When I was stuck later on, it seemed the solution required apple slices instead of the whole apple, but since I had already used the knife unsuccessfully earlier, I didn’t immediately think of simply trying again.

Fortunately, in between banging your head against the wall, there are also fun puzzles! My favorite piece of resourceful gameplay is the use of a candle to shed more light in dark corners, often revealing hidden messages and even objects. What’s even more clever is that not only does this work on your surroundings, it also helps in taking a closer look at items already in your inventory to find possible secrets. Of course, you have to find said candle and the matches to light it first. Ever onward, though, you have an unlimited supply of firesticks and the candle becomes a permanent tool next to the inventory icon. Clicking it will automatically light it, and your cursor will start glowing as you go through the regular motions of exploring a location. After a couple of seconds, however, the candle will go out again, so it doesn’t work as a continuous burning flashlight.

Another nice touch is the addition of two mini-games – one on an abandoned laptop, the other on an arcade machine – which also become available to play directly from the main menu. Tank Man is a version of Pac-Man, while Brainworms is a version of Snake. Unlike the rest of the game, both are keyboard controlled. The first one is just for fun, replacing the yellow man with a tank while the ghosts are now groups of protesters, but the joy wears off quickly due to a very cramped, claustrophobic visual style that turned me jittery and made the game harder than it should be. The second one is quite easy, with a green worm getting longer after eating the scattered apples in the playing field. Julius actually needs to play it within the game itself and reach a certain level to receive a much-needed item.

Since the title is Lost on Cow Island, I was definitely expecting cows, but I wouldn’t have thought Julius would know that. And yet he doesn’t even bat an eyelash when he encounters his first bovine – not standing on all fours in a pasture chewing grass as you would expect, but instead an anthropomorphic talking bull dressed up as a farmer operating a sales booth. Later on, you also meet a talking horse. These animals seem to coexist peacefully with the island’s human inhabitants, like a cowboy, a goth girl working in a plant store, and an assayer you can trade riches with.

Julius seems to think this is all perfectly normal, but as far as I know, never in the history of the world did intelligent ruminants rule. So I thought perhaps talking animals were prevalent in Julius’s time as well, and this adventure was supposed to take place in a more diversified, multi-species cartoon setting. But no, near the end of the game Julius does address the strange existence of all these talking animals, although only in a conversation you could easily skip entirely if you want.

Eventually, though, so many weird, nonsensical things had happened that I just rolled with it as if I were Alice in Wonderland. I encountered many more talking animals roaming around freely, but I also ran into a zoo where a couple of them – a sloth, a giraffe, a gorilla and a tiger – are locked up in cages. Very strange. There’s also a robot, an alien, and a group of pirates to interact with, and at one point Julius shrinks to the size of a mouse, turning Lost on Cow Island into an almost psychedelic experience where anything goes.

All these unusual characters are fully voiced, and voiced extremely well. The cowboy talks with a Western drawl, the goth girl conveys stereotypical ennui, the bakery owner sounds very jolly, while the veteran operating a kind of antique store has a no-nonsense attitude. When Julius is talking to Doc in the cave, there’s an echo effect reflecting the vastness of the cavern. My favorite voice was the horse who hates to be interrupted; quite the diva and in my opinion the most hilarious performance of them all. At one point you attend a party with a collection of different animals, each talking in its own accent: Scottish, Australian, British, American, though of course it’s never explained how they all ended up together.

The soundtrack features a distinct theme for each location that reinforces the island's identity. You hear a cheerful, lighthearted melody in the village with the shops, while the farm with the horse is reminiscent of a classic Western with twangy accents. In the pirate bar you hear an almost caricatured sea shanty, while the cow king’s castle has a full symphonic, appropriately regal track. A garden party full of different animals has a playful flute cheering up the mood, but in an abandoned mansion the music shifts to slow, dark sounds with a distinctly haunting undertone.

Another striking aspect of the presentation is the beautifully hand-painted artwork depicting all corners of Cow Island. At least, I hope they are hand-painted; on the game’s Steam page it’s noted that “several drawings of inventory items are provided by AI.” These days, one can only wonder: why? And is that really the only thing? In any case, I was impressed by an aesthetic that resembles the soft brushstrokes of impressionist paintings. Strangely, even though they are animated as well, the non-playable characters – with the exception of Doc Braun – are also drawn in this style, compared to the sharper-outlined, more detailed main character who stands out in sharp contrast to the painterly backgrounds.

As nice as they are to look at, the backgrounds do display another peculiarity about the island. While some locations are in bright daylight (the beach, the farm, the village), others are set at dusk (a clearing in the forest) and even at night (the mansion and the assayer’s shop). Then the time of day will switch back as soon as you change locations again. Climb the modest mountain with the sun setting behind it, and suddenly there’s a blizzard blowing when you reach the top. Go back down and the skies are clear again. It adds a certain charm and unique atmosphere to each scene, but it hardly makes sense.

The game does have a map, but there’s only a limited time you can actually use it for fast travel. The map features a couple of lightning bolts, and for a while Julius will be teleported to those locations when you click on them – literally, as he comments “Wow, I just teleported!” – though it only takes him to a general area. Suddenly, however, I noticed these lightning bolts were gone and I could no longer fast travel; instead the map only showed Julius’s face in his current location.

Lost on Cow Island has a handy manual save function, and this is one game where it’s very much needed. There are three possible endings, with only one of them good. The two bad ones are easy to obtain. The good one, though, can be tricky. You make the choice of either bad ending in a very strange location – we’re talking Stanley Kubrick-level sci-fi territory here – by opening one of two doors. Or you can do something else instead and continue the game a bit longer for the good ending.

The problem is that from this point on you can’t interact with the island dwellers anymore, so if you haven’t succeeded in acquiring all car parts yet, you will never be able to get them anymore, softlocking you from reaching the good… or, well, any ending anymore. That happened to me, and I had to reload to a point before I entered that location. But when I tried, the game actually crashed on me, because I attempted to do something that it was programmed not to allow anymore. Even for an absurdly crazy, illogical and mind-blowing game, suddenly transporting me back to my desktop was a bit too much. 

Final Verdict

While at first I noticed only the many, many flaws and gruelling design decisions in Lost on Cow Island, pretty soon its virtues grabbed me. Between the gorgeous backgrounds, the fitting voices, and searching through dark corners with that candle, I found myself having fun almost in spite of the puzzles’ attempt to thwart my progress. Even if not everything makes sense or fits well together when you stop and think about it, that familiar old-school adventure game feel is definitely there. There is a lot to do and many inventory items to collect, with plenty of funny conversations in between. Actually using those items in the “correct” way, however, isn’t so much a matter of pushing your brain cells to the limit as resorting to puzzle experimentation until something randomly works. That too can be entertaining for a while, but in tossing out the last forty years of genre evolution, the game might just leave you twitching and disoriented like a mad cow yourself.

Johnny played Lost on Cow Island on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.