Lost Words: Beyond the Page

The Good
The platforming is pretty unique with both 2.5D levels and 2D journal pages. Amazingly the translated versions do a good job of being faithful to the English language version, makes me curious if the mechanics are more or less the same in the Japanese version. Trial and error in the world of Estoria allows you to solve puzzles and try to collect all the fireflies, which make up all the fun you could want.

The art is lovely all over - watercolor drawings and 3D-rendered environment. To match the graphical style, there are many mood swings in the game, so that you can almost feel happy or sympathetic for Isabelle, it's almost like listening and watching the life story of a real person plus looking inside her imagination. The choice of mythological creatures for the land of Estoria is positively tasteful, be it a grouchy djinn, a troubled fiery efreet or apocalyptic dragon. It might surprise players to see that one journal section alludes the intro style of a Star Wars movie. Even the music captures the feeling of both emotion and watching / playing a movie.

The Bad
The gameplay is mostly just a straight up platformer. Apart from using the magic book, there isn't a whole lot you can interact with such as the NPC's or much of the environment, but that's probably asking too much for an already great game. What the game could have used is the ability to type your own name for the story character and customise her appearance to your liking, since the three limited names and colour schemes are only cosmetic differences, not doing much to add replay value.

The Bottom Line
This is a game that really dares to be ever so uniquely different from both platformers and fantasy-oriented games. You can really get hooked on playing this game as the story gets darker and more tragic both from Isabelle's end and her story character's end. It's almost like playing a fantasy version of Inside / Limbo with reduced difficulty and minus the horror genre. It would be intriguing if this game did stimulate a player's imagination to write a story and perhaps teach foreign languages to players getting versions that aren't in their native languages. A commendable game that will shine its magic on any players lucky enough to play it.