Oh, wouldn’t life be magical if the conventions of videogames were even close to being something like real life? Certainly, if your life were anything like Lost: The Video Game, it’d probably run a little like this: you come home from work, having run to your house, full pelt for 20 minutes, stopping only once when you charged headfirst into a tree, with no obvious side effects. Once you get to your front door you phase out slightly, as your brain ‘loads’ the next area, namely your living room. "Hey, I’m over here in the kitchen," shouts your girlfriend. You can’t talk to her from a distance of course, so she continues barking at you: "Hey, in here!", "Hey, over here in the kitchen." Sprinting from the living room towards your girlfriend, who’s standing, stock still in the centre of the kitchen sneering vacantly at the wall, you begin the evening’s conversation.

Strangely intonated staccato bursts of interrogative noise spew from your mouths as you work your way through a string of humourless questions. Once the evening’s natter is over and you’ve stumbled across the magic question about eating, she leaves her spot in the kitchen and strolls over to another area to stand, motionless, in another part of the house, while you ‘combine’ dinner.

Of a normal evening, dinner items will be scattered about the house. You’ll find some ham on the bathroom floor, a mango in the bedroom, and a whole roast chicken in a cupboard, which you discovered after your girlfriend gave you a hint at the location. You’ll then combine them in the large metal pot you found in the shower, et voila, cold mango, ham and chicken in a pot. Just like momma used to make. After dinner, you sit down to watch a little TV, but oh no! the fuse has blown. Cue 20 minutes of searching your house, flaming torch in hand (with another four or five in your backpack, for when that one ‘runs out’) for three bizarrely spaced out, and increasingly confusing, fuse boxes to fix.

Then your mate might pop round – by pop round we mean randomly appear in your house, chopping the same bit of wood over and over. A quick chat leads to a little bartering, where you’ll swap items you found during the course of the day. Seven paper clips, four coconuts and a jerry can of petrol for a lock pick, to enable you to enter your shed, and three batteries.

If you haven’t gathered already, Lost is a rolling cliché machine. We thought it was going to be horrendous, but it surprised us by being merely bad. Its licensed roots show through, and it’s ultimately still not worth buying.

Tom Leclerc