Lost And Found Co. review (of the YouTube videos I watched alongside it)

Lost And Found Co. is Where's Wally with a mouse pointer. You peer into orthographic worlds and you long to live within them: bustling city streets filled with colourful stores, buskers, and cute cats; a cluttered house that looks like it's fallen out of the pages of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Tokyo Style; a park, a jungle, a swamp, a convenience store, an island bar, a cat cafe.

The game's objective is that you find a given list of items in each location to bring notoriety back to a shrine goddess and win a popularity contest against an evil corporate president. My objective, however, is to dissociate of an evening while watching YouTube videos on a second screen. So let's appraise Lost And Found Co. in how it enables my goals.

Video 1: Episode 43 by Quest For The Best

Second screens have been a commonplace part of PC gaming for decades, and today people refer to certain releases as "podcast games". It's certainly always been a regular part of how I play games. I used to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer on an adjacent television while playing Counter-Strike betas; now I watch video essays about Buffy The Vampire Slayer on an adjacent computer monitor while playing games like Lost And Found Co., which may be the very antithesis of Counter-Strike.

Hidden object games are perfect fodder for this, because they rely on a kind of ambient focus. Look too closely, too intently for your next target, and you will become stressed. Why can't I find this golden egg, I ask myself. Perhaps I will never find this golden egg. Perhaps the golden egg is on a different screen. Perhaps this is a bug and the developers forgot to include the golden egg. Once this anxious impatience settles into my bones, a psychological countdown timer begins ticking downwards until I look up a walkthrough. A walkthrough causes a game like Lost And Found Co. to evaporate. It's like trying to win at a jigsaw. 

A second screen helps get me out of this insidious gamer mindset and into where Lost And Found Co. needs me, which is to treat it as a pass-time in the most literal sense. I am here to just be. The golden egg will reveal itself in time.

The Quest For The Best podcast is perfect for this. I am what the people of Reddit would derisively call an "anime tourist", in that I watch only the mega hits and typically lose interest after a season or two. Quest For The Best's hosts, meanwhile, manage to be simultaneously passionate and welcoming. Geoff Thew, in particular, who also runs the Mother's Basement YouTube channel, has a broad and gluttonous appetite that is infectious. I'm never going to be an anime citizen, but the podcast makes me believe I might one day own an anime summer home, and in the meantime the amiable banter between the three hosts is a great accompaniment to washing the dishes and to Lost And Found Co. By the end of this episode, I have found the golden egg. 

Video 2: Saw by ContraPoints

Lost And Found Co.'s big pitch beyond "coloured-in Hidden Folks" is that it wraps your hunt for bric-a-brac in a story. You - as much as you embody anyone - are Ducky, a literal duck transformed into a human boy and so-named by a goddess of war. The goddess's power is tied to people's faith in her, and she has grown weak and isolated, waiting for death by watching videos on her phone. Oh hi.

A chance encounter with a video streamer changes things, bringing a new route to inspiring the masses, and a new method in finding people's lost items. All of this is cute as heck, both in character designs and in the broad, cartoonish personalities of the cast. It's also in desperate need of an editor. Every dialogue scene is a visual novel back-and-forth without conflict or comedy, and often riddled with repetition and typos. Mostly, I just think it could have been a lot shorter.

A video so eloquently written and frictionless that it feels as if it is constructed of your own unexpressed thoughts

I haven't seen any of the Saw movies, but I think anyone who has the barest idea of what they are and some basic media literacy could make a few educated assumptions: they're probably not as bad as the "torture porn" label suggested; they've probably got muddled politics when it comes to the use of violence; and they probably only became more muddled as success demanded the series continue for ten instalments. Sure enough, here's a YouTube video to say all of the above and to take an hour and a half to do it.

After watching ContraPoints' video essay spell all this out, I feel no more compelled to watch the Saw films, nor has my understanding of those films meaningfully increased. I'm not sure the fifteen-minute diversion on the revenge movies of Tarantino really did anything to expand the thesis, for example, and the references throughout to Italian philosophy washed over me like so many hidden objects, found.

This sounds like criticism, and it is if the bar is that which has been set by some of ContraPoints' other videos, which I love, and have in some instances re-watched several times. If the bar is instead other YouTube video essays, then this is the highest praise. Do you know how hard it is to write a 90-minute monologue that holds the audience's attention throughout, with jokes and Italian philosophy? A video so eloquently written and frictionless that it feels as if it is constructed of your own unexpressed thoughts? I turn a lot of YouTube videos off after a few minutes and I watched this to the end gladly.

I finished Lost And Found Co.'s story gladly, too. I then opened the Jank Discord server (subscribers only, money-havers) and had a good whinge about it, but while my criticism of it remains genuine, I still feel warmly towards Ducky, the goddess, and the rest of its oddball characters by the story's end. That's easily taken for granted.

Plus, maybe other people needed this Saw video and maybe, to other people, line after line of dialogue isn't anathema to zoning out, or they're not even playing Lost And Found Co. to zone out. In any case, there are umpteen side missions that are mostly-optional and much lighter on the story, and there's a skip button on screen during every conversation that I could have pressed if I hadn't felt duty-bound by the review process to experience them in full.

At least the frisson created between Lost And Found Co.'s Nickelodeon-ass world and Jigsaw razor-wiring a guy to death enhanced both video and game.

Video 3: Rolling A Kayak So We Don't Die by Beau Miles

Explicit dialogue aside, Lost And Found Co. provides tools to help you find what you're looking for. There is the picture of the object itself on the interface (albeit sometimes off screen, requiring you to scroll the list - this is annoying). There is also the story being told by the picture you're panning-and-scanning over, which you learn to get better at reading over time.

Here's an example I made-up: a large city scene might contain several dogs, all of them cute. You initially see these and think, "Dogs! Cute." One of the objects you're looking for is a tennis ball, which is marked on the UI as being currently obscured behind or inside something else. If you're really paying attention here, you'll have already noticed that only one of the dogs is barking, and they're barking at a postbox. This is the good kind of hint. Click the postbox and the tennis ball falls out.

Lost And Found Co. is a game about learning how to direct your attention and really notice the world around you. This is also why I like Beau Miles videos. 

Or one of the reasons. He's also just an absurdly charismatic Australian bloke, but his videos are all about looking at the world a little askance and revealing or doing something surprising with what he finds. Long distance running as a window into history; building a cabin out of junk; drinking from bottles he finds at the side of the road. All of these ideas, in other people's hands, might be tacky challenges and YouTube algo bait, but Miles is never quite so obvious.

Lost And Found Co. can make things obvious for you, if you want. Any object you need to find (as part of a mandatory objective, anyway), can be clicked on in the UI to reveal a hint about its location. These are the bad kinds of hints, and almost always make it immediately obvious where the object is. Here's an example I just made up for the tennis ball: "It looks like the noisy dog has found it." If that's still not enough, you can spend a collectible (but plentiful) resource to get an even more direct hint, if you can call it that: "Inside the postbox by the barking dog."

I hated using either of those types of hints. I sometimes caved and did so, and at times the first explicit hint feels all but essential, yet it also felt like a failure on my part every time. If only I had been a little more patient. If only I had been better at noticing. Beau Miles wouldn't use the hints.

Video 4: Lost And Found Co. full game playthrough by Zhain Gaming

Alright look, there are no hints for the optional objectives and it was 2am and I really wanted to find that fucking stuffed toy and go to bed.