Lost Horizon

In this point and click adventure, you play as Fenton Paddock, a former soldier in the British Army who was stationed in Hong Kong. Now he is employed as a pilot and smuggling cargo. He is hired by a governor to find the Governor's son who is Fenton's close friend who was lost on an expedition to Tibet. Fenton finds it’s not what it seems, and the adventure ends up reminiscent of a Broken Sword story; meaning there’s some ancient mystery, lots of danger, and leads to an adventure spanning several countries. It starts in Hong Kong, then leads to Tibet, Morocco, Germany, and India.

I was impressed with the graphics, they are very colourful and the painted backgrounds work well.

The controls are the standard set-up. Left-click to interact/pick up, right-click to inspect. Spacebar highlights objects you can interact with.

I felt I employed the same strategy throughout most of the game. I enter an area, pick-up everything I could, try and combine them to make new items, then work out what I need to do from there. In other point-and-click games, I normally understand the main objective and sub objectives, then have to be creative to get there.

You would think this would mean I was reaching for a walk-through more than usual, but this wasn’t the case. There were times where I missed an item, but I think you can work out what you need to do with your contraptions once you have created them.

There were a couple of places where two characters had to work together to solve a puzzle. I would have liked to see this aspect used more, especially because Fenton’s relationship with Kim seemed underdeveloped.

If you like point-and-click adventures then I would recommend this. I can’t help but think it is an inferior Broken Sword though. It’s quite hard to put my finger on why this is. I think there’s just some magic that works in the early Broken Sword that makes the locales more interesting, and the story feels better paced and intriguing.