Achievements don't really mean much these days. I don't say that in the boomer, 'everyone gets a trophy kids are too soft' kind of way, I mean gamer-wise. When I was a kid, my friends and I who were into gaming were all about grabbing Achievements and upping our Gamerscore. It wasn't about beating the game on the hardest possible difficulty or having the best K/DA, not unless those things popped a sweet, sweet 'cheevo. For kids like me, there are some games which are legendary not because they were great, or because we enjoyed them, but because they were supercharged with Achievement Juice. Today is the 15th anniversary of maybe the best game ever to do it - Lost: Via Domus.
Lost: Via꧟ Domus was a sandbox game based on the TV show Lost, and even by tie-in game standards, it was pretty poor. While the show had a deep sense of mystique, questions about the human condition, and confronted our fears of both war and religion through powerful, if often heavy-handed metaphors, the game was just a series of fetch quests and nonsensical conversations with characters from said TV show.
I didn't watch Lost when it was initially on the air, only catching it years later when the box sets were going cheap in a fire sale. So when I played Via Domus, I barely had any idea who these people were besides basic pop culture osmosis. However, having watched clips of the game back since, I don't think having any love for Lost would have improved the experience. In fact, it might have made it worse. The clip below of Charlie singing 'You All Everybody' acapella with no lead in or follow up typifies not only the experience of Lost: Via Domus, but also how the little monkeys who run your brain feel when they see you sweeping up the title's Gamerscore.
Achievements and Trophies don't tend to be held in such high esteem these days. Part of that has been the shift to online gaming and live-service, where the parameters of success are user defined and constantly shifting, and another part may be that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation has continued to dominate on the console front and Trophies are harder to compare than the numeric ranking of Achievements. Whateveꦬr the case, games that are used primarily as Achievement factories barely exist anymore, but Lost: Via Domus will always be remembered as a great of the genre.
Lost could be beaten in less than ten hours, and while you'd have to work a little, it didn't take a lot of thought nor wandering off the prescribed path to 1K it. Back when Achievements were given more consideration, devs would often have a couple of more punishing ones to press players into replaying or challenging themselves. Achievements could be a mark of honour if you had one that few others did. Over time, they gradually became an afterthought for a lot of games, and ignored by players themselves, but 15 years on it's worth giving a passing thought to Lost.
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It was not the only titan of this very niche industry. In Achievement Hunting circles, Lost: Via Domus to🐻ok second place for many to Avatar: The Burning Earth. That game had just five Achievements, and they were all for the same thing. The first is for registering a h🔯it counter of ten, then of 20, then 30, then 40, and finally 50. Inside the first 60 seconds of the tutorial, you can easily notch up 50 by tapping a single button all over again. In fact, you can even get up to 100, but no one ever plays for long enough to get there. Just 50, pop, and get out.
This is why I've always been on Via Domus' team. While I played both, Avatar is over so quickly that you barely remember it. Via Domus doesn't ask a lot of you, but you will at least need to spend time with it, and all these years on, I feel more affection for it than I ever could for The Burning Earth. Not many will care about Lost: Via Domus hitting its crystal anniversary, but from Achievement Hunters everywhere, it has our respect.