Lost But Found Review: Addictive Chaos

Since I got Steam, almost every day I like to check in and see what new games are out there. One thing I like to do is check out the demos, which are a great way to test out a game. Most games I’ve played are good fun and I keep an eye out for them later, as they have yet to be released. Some games though are so good that I know that I have to get the full release. One such game that took me by surprise was Lost But Found, a simple, quick, yet addictive game. I played the demo, and was enjoying it so much I managed to keep playing beyond the set time. I knew I had to get it upon full release, and sure enough, I did. The question is: was it worth getting the full release? You’ll have to read my review of Lost But Found to find out!

Lost But Found is available on Steam for $4.99.

Story – So Much Lost Stuff!

The premise of Lost But Found is very straightforward. It is essentially a job simulator game (but unlike many other job simulator games, it’s not called “[insert job title here] simulator”). You assume the role of an officer at an airport, specifically in charge of the lost and found property department. If anyone loses something at the airport, it goes to you. Your job is to keep the stuff safe, keep it all organized on the table, and then customers will come to the desk and request their item. You then have to hand the right item over.

Sounds simple, right? Well, for the most part, it is. We’ll talk more about the actual gameplay in the next section of this review of Lost But Found, but as a lost & found officer, you have to deal with all kinds of things, such as thieves, black market dealers, and homeless people.

There’s not really much of a story that goes with Lost But Found. You do have to send part of your hard-earned wages to your family, and this is actually mandatory. Fail to do this three shifts in a row and it’s game over. You can, however, buy a perk where you can cease this, but the max you have to pay each time is $150, and when you’re making about $1000 or more each day, that doesn’t seem quite so bad.

The ultimate goal of Lost But Found is to save up enough money from your airport job to pay the bank back. Specifically, you have to repay $30,000. Once you hit this target, you’ve completed the game. How quickly you achieve this depends on whether or not you bought perks, and how much money you make in your shifts. It’s a simple set-up, but I don’t think a game like this really needs a story of any kind. It’s a straightforward but fun job simulator, and that’s fine.

Gameplay – Organized (or Not So Organized) Chaos

Lost But Found is a neat little mixture of job simulation but also hidden objects. At first, you might wonder where the hidden objects element comes in, but trust me when I say that it makes a lot more sense the more you play, especially in the more challenging difficulty settings.

The Set-Up

When you play Lost But Found, you’ll see a table, which is where all the lost property goes. There’s also a conveyer belt where the lost items frequently roll in. Your customers appear at the top of the screen, with a speech bubble telling you the requested item. There’s also a bin for discarding post-it notes and a box for donating items to the black market. You’ll also see a calendar with the current day in the game, a timer counting down your day, a money note displaying how much cash you’ve made, and your journal that documents your day’s activity and any stickers you’ve collected so far. You’ve got all the information you need to play out this game, nothing extra unnecessarily. That’s just as well, since things can get a little crazy in the harder modes, you don’t need the game’s layout to be anything overly complicated.

What an easy difficulty in Lost But Found generally looks like.

Dealing With Customers (and Other Annoying People)

Here’s how the game works. Every day, new lost items roll in. You must place them on the table ASAP. If you leave it too late, the items drop off and you get penalized.

Every few moments, someone will approach the desk, asking for a specific item – and when I say specific, I mean specific. For example, someone might ask for a Wooden Hairbrush, not the normal Hairbrush you also get. If you hand the wrong item over, you’ll get penalized and the customer will be unhappy. Customers also don’t stick around for very long. You literally have 3 seconds to locate the right item, pick it up, and hand it over. Three seconds really isn’t very long at all under these pressured circumstances, and it gets even worse when you have a ton of items piling up on your table and three waiting customers at the same time! If you make your customers too unhappy, you’ll get a game over. 

If you fail to deal with a customer in time, they’ll leave, but fortunately you won’t get punished (unless you do this too many times in one level, leading to the above-mentioned game over outcome). They may come back, or if you don’t have the requested item, they’ll leave their phone number and the name of the item so you can always call them back. When this happens, you have to manually dial the number into the phone on your screen – and this is in the midst of a busy day! The customer isn’t always guaranteed to come back either. Maybe because they already bought a replacement?

Customers won’t hang around all day.

You don’t just deal with customers looking to retrieve lost items either. You also have to watch out for thieves, who will steal your hard-earned money until you spray them with pepper spray. Security officers will also approach your desk, requesting specific items such as ID cards, combination lock bags, top secret files, and briefcases. You’ll also be paid visits by black market dealers, who will take items off your hands and sell them on the black market. You even have a homeless man asking if you have anything to give him. Do so and he’ll send you written notes in gratitude. Additionally, in the hardest craziest mode, there’s one annoying customer who will come and jumble up all your stuff. If you thought it was disorganized before, it certainly will be now! You never know what you’ll get working the lost & found desk, and that’s one of the appealing aspects of this game.

Each day only lasts three minutes, which really isn’t long. You can buy a perk to get extra time, but this only adds another 20 seconds, which isn’t bad but still isn’t a lot. I think I would have preferred a longer time for each day. Not by much longer though. I would have gone for 5 minutes, no more. Adding an extra 2 minutes to the day I think would have worked better.

You can call customers back if you have their items.

The Lost Items

You get all kinds of things arriving on your desk, the typical sort of stuff you might lose at an airport. A variety of clothes, expensive electronics, wallets, bags, luggage, passports, notepads, books, keys, make-up, jewelry, toys, pets, and pens can land on your desk. In the lower difficulties or first days in your game, things are fairly quiet, but in those harder modes, your desk will get cluttered very fast!

With some items, there are mini-games. For example, some clothes and plushies come in dirty and can be sponged clean. This isn’t mandatory, but you do get extra money for this. Other scenarios include signing documents. There’s even one where if you manage to learn the combination box’s numbers, you get a mini-game where you have to defuse a bomb!

On certain items, including suitcases, rucksacks, laptops, and water bottles, you can find stickers, which you can peel off and take for yourself. The game even documents all the stickers you’ve collected so far. If you enjoy collectibles in games, you’ll like this one.

Yep. Things can certainly get out of hand!

Buying Perks

After each shift, there are a few things you get to do. You get to leave your workstation at the airport and head to places around town, such as the shop, security office, black market auction, and your home. 

At the shop, you can buy useful perks to make life a bit easier at work. These include a clock to add some extra time to your day, a fan to make customers wait longer, a till to prevent thieves from stealing your money, table expansions, and a tips box for customers. I’m not 100% sure if all these work though. Some perks definitely do, like the time extension, thief deterrent, and table expansion, and they are useful. However, when I bought the fan to make customers wait longer, I didn’t really notice any difference. Perhaps there was and it’s too subtle. The other thing you have to be aware of is that these perks are in the form of objects that sit on your probably-already-cluttered table. I would have preferred it if these perks were shown as UI instead, so you knew you had them. This was probably done purposefully to add to the challenge of the game.

You can also visit the security office for more useful perks, such as a 10% salary increase and making security mini-games easier. The black market place also have extra items, such as a scanner for those post-it notes so you don’t have to manually input a customer’s phone number, and a magnifying glass to see the value of items.

Although you ultimately need the money to pay off the bank, having these items available does give you another incentive to play so you can save up and buy them and see how it affects your game, whether or not they make things easier.

You can buy various perks to help you at work.

How Difficult Do You Want Your Game to Be?

Lost But Found can be played in four different difficulties, from super easy and chilled out to total and utter chaos. This set-up works really well if you want to ease your way into the game and not feel like you’re thrown into the deep-end too early, although on all settings, the first set of days are much calmer and quieter before things really pick up and get out of hand. The only thing you need to be aware of is that once you pick a difficulty, you’re stuck with it for that saved game. If you want to play in a different difficulty, you need to start again.

When it says Mayhem, it really does mean that!

Graphics & Audio – Slick Cartoon Style With Jazz Thrown In

Lost But Found adopts a cartoonish art style that works very well with the game. All the items are distinguishable from one another, which makes things much easier when looking for a particular item among a hundred on the table! I especially like the sticker designs. The font the game uses also works well, easy to read, which is especially helpful when identifying objects by hovering the cursor over them.

Lost But Found also has music that plays while you sort through endless items and deal with numerous customers. Again, the music complements the game well, playing jazzy music that is oddly relaxing yet makes you want to focus on work. The sound effects did a good job too, especially when announcing the arrival of a customer. You could not only tell when someone was waiting to be served, but also what kind of customer they were. Thieves, for example, came with an ominous chuckle, so you knew who they were without even looking up and could deal with them swiftly.