. 5 min read.

Lost in Play is the cartoon my daughter keeps asking to play

Lost in Play is a puzzle game with nothing to read, easy to share with a four-year-old or with a partner who never plays video games. A clear favorite.

My four-year-old daughter keeps asking when we're playing Lost in Play again. I can't think of a tougher critic. At that age, nobody pretends to like something to be polite.

Lost in Play is a point-and-click adventure game1 from 2022 in which a brother and sister get lost in their own imagination while trying to find their way home. It has no dialogue, takes no skill with a controller, and is easy to share with a four-year-old. After Alba, our first game for four hands, it's our second big favorite, and this one I'd recommend to grown-ups as well.

Gal, a girl with curly red hair, dances in a meadow next to a picnic blanket, surrounded by a duck in aviator goggles sitting cross-legged, a giant frog holding a teacup, and a blue-bearded goblin in a pointed hat. A gold crown floats in the sky.
Tea with the frog, a perfectly normal afternoon inside Gal's head (official screenshot from Happy Juice Games).

A cartoon you get to hold the remote for

The game comes from Happy Juice Games, a studio in Tel Aviv that had seven people on staff when Apple handed it a 2024 Design Award in the innovation category2. Cofounder Oren Rubin drew Toto and Gal after his own kids3, and the team wanted to capture what it feels like when siblings play make-believe and end up half lost in their heads and half lost in the neighborhood. That plays out over 15 episodes in which the two kids start a rebellion in a goblin village and help a team of frogs pull a sword from a stone4.

The art direction is simply gorgeous. It's hand-drawn, animated like a TV show, and openly indebted to Gravity Falls, Hilda, and Over the Garden Wall4. The studio kept cartoon tricks down to the camera work, which shakes whenever something gets scary2. Alba got by on modest graphics. Lost in Play feels like steering an episode of a cartoon, with the added bonus that it doesn't end after 22 minutes.

Puzzles at kid height

The characters speak made-up gibberish, so everything comes through pictures, gestures, and drawn speech bubbles. For a four-year-old who can't read yet, that changes everything. In Alba, I read the dialogue out loud. Here there's nothing to read at all.

Alba was also very relaxed, a stroll where you photograph birds and never get stuck. Lost in Play makes you think harder, with more than 30 puzzles and minigames where you have to look closely, try things, and combine two objects that had no business meeting. My daughter keeps up just fine, though, and she's the one helping me solve the puzzles. I've decided not to think too hard about what that says about her father.

For real dead ends, a hint system nudges you along without handing over the answer. The developers grew up on old-school adventure games and remember being stuck in them for months2. A few scenes lean on mild cartoon scares, like a monster chase or red eyes in the dark, and the age rating depends on which store you ask5. Every parent can judge that against their own kid.

Even for people who never play

I wouldn't recommend Alba to an adult playing alone, since it's built so squarely for kids. Lost in Play I'd recommend without a second thought. To parents, obviously, but also to couples where one person, like my partner, has zero interest in video games. You don't need reflexes or any gaming background, and it's genuinely funny while still pulling you in. Oren Rubin says as much himself, since the best thing his team hears is that parents enjoy playing it with their kids2.

The game costs 14.25 euros on Steam and also runs on Mac, Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, iPhone, and Android3. It wraps up in about five hours, and some critics grumbled about a puzzle whose logic is a stretch3. Personally, I can't find much wrong with it.

We play it on my laptop, hooked up to the living room TV and running Bazzite, a Linux distribution built for gaming6. There's no Linux version of the game, but Proton, Valve's compatibility layer that runs Windows games on Linux, handles it just fine. My daughter has no idea, which makes her the most relaxed Linux user I know.

In the Alba article, I hoped my daughter's progress would open up more demanding worlds for us over time. Here we are, and in this one she's the one showing me the way. If you're looking for a game to share, with a kid or with someone who has never held a controller, start with this one.

Notes

  1. A kind of adventure game where you click around the scenery to search it, pick up objects, and combine them, with no reflexes required. Readers of a certain age will remember The Secret of Monkey Island. ↩

  2. Apple, "Behind the Design: Creating the make-believe magic of Lost in Play", on how the game came together, why it has no dialogue, and how its hint system works. It was also the App Store's iPad Game of the Year for 2023. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The game's Wikipedia page lists its release dates by platform, from PC, Mac, and Switch in 2022 to PlayStation in 2024, along with its critical reception. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. The Happy Juice Games press kit, which names its three model shows. ↩ ↩2

  5. The Nintendo eShop lists PEGI 3, while the Family Gaming Database gives it PEGI 7 for those few scary moments. ↩

  6. Bazzite's website. On ProtonDB, which collects reports from Linux players, Lost in Play gets the top rating, Platinum. ↩

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