Lost In Memories

Hour of gameplay & thoughts (SPOILERS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eh-SK8tbTw Lost in Memories is a stylish and heart-filled point and click horror game that feels like it was dropped out of the early 2000s (in the best way possible). You work your way through the haunted house, unraveling the story of who you are and what happened to your family (though chiefly your wife, who seems quite annoyed at you) by way of picking up items, putting them in your inventory, and using them to interact with the world. Puzzles are the name of the game in classic find-and-use-elsewhere point and click style. The game does contain some jumpscares but nothing seemed too overly cheap or frightening. Once you get jumpscared a few times the rest lose their luster anyhow, which I think holds true for most games in the genre. Technically, the game controls a little bizarrely (sometimes needing to pick items up in the world and use in-game physics to break or otherwise manipulate them), but overall things felt fairly tight and concise. Some puzzles were apparent while others took some thought, and though I did find myself lost and stuck at some points, most was able to be figured out. There also seemed to be a bit of randomness insofar as the starting "state" of the game - in that there may be multiple different starting states and, as a result, multiple paths to beating the game - which is cool and kinda novel. It's also worth mentioning that this game was duo-developed by a couple, cameoing two of their kids (as, I think, ghost babies?), which is equally sweet as it is endearing. Admittedly, I haven't beaten the game at the time of writing, but seeing that the game has received 4 updates since I played it on launch, I'm thinking some of the minor gripes and jank I experienced has been removed. It seemed like I got pretty far towards beating it tho, in which I would say it's a relatively short but quite sweet experience, and think it's a worthwhile purchase if you want to scratch the particular retro, point and click, kinda Silent Hill-esque itch that comes along now and again. Seeing that this was seemingly the dev-couple's first debut (at least as far as Battleground Studios is concerned), I think this is a fairly strong first stab!