Forever Lost: Episode 1 HD

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: you wake up in what appears to be a creepy deserted asylum, with no idea of where you are or what’s happened to you. Scrawled across the walls are cryptic yet ominous messages… Yep, Forever Lost opens in a fairly well-worn horror environment. But as you start to explore your surroundings and investigate the objects around you, you’re quickly sucked into the atmosphere of intrigue as you unravel the narrative that’s fed to you piece by piece.

The controls are nicely tactile – the point-and-click nature of adventure games lends itself well to iOS gaming – letting you jab at items and scroll through your inventory. There’s a nice touch too, in the form of your photo album: you can take snaps of things you want to remember later and then, when browsing them, scribble your own notes and so on over the top of them to remind yourself of where they might come in useful later. It’s a shame, though, that your exploration does feel slightly limited. When you enter a room, you can’t freely look around you or zoom in and out – the camera is fixed, and you can only tap to zoom in on particular items. This is a knowing game though, with unexpected moments of humour and a particular wink at the player when you have to pick up an iPad and play a game called ‘iCeption’.

All in all, it’s a dense couple of hours of clever puzzling. It’s not just a case of ‘use item A to open box B’, either – without giving away spoilers, one of our favourite moments involved a photograph and a xylophone. There’s a comprehensive list of optional hints, too, so you’ll never be stuck frustrated in any one area for longer than you want to be. All this for 69p? It’s great value for point-and-click fans.