The Lost In Play gameplay trailer will give a good idea of what the game is like: cartoon-style art, puzzle solving and adventure game mechanics:
The story reminded me a little of Over the Garden Wall, in that you have a pair of siblings who become lost in a fantastical world beyond the boundaries of their garden. Sometimes you play as one sibling, sometimes another, and one sequence let you switch between them as needed. The story is wordless - as the trailer points out, all dialogue is gibberish. This works most of the time, although there were a few moments while I was playing some of the mini-games when I felt that an explanation in language rather than through visuals would have helped clarify useful details. Even the handy hint system in the game relies on showing you visual clues when you get stuck, rather than offering an explanation in words. Most of the time this was enough to get me through the odd moment of frustration, and for the other times trial and error often worked.
Something I particularly loved about this game was its humour. Without giving spoilers, there's an entire sequence involving a chicken full of small, visual gags that reminded me of some of the humour in the Monkey Island games. Another inventive episode saw callbacks to earlier moments in the game, but offered a new twist on those. In many ways "inventive" is probably the best way to describe the feeling of this game. Landscapes, characters, and the adventure game elements were very much based on a child's wild imagination. So almost anything could happen, and it often did.
The mini-games were more conventional, offering up puzzle formats that were often familiar to me from other games. But it's no chore to play through those, and in some ways they offer small, refreshing breaks from the standard adventure game mechanics of finding objects and figuring out how to use those. Not that there's anything wrong with those. I really enjoyed those sequences too.
The game can be finished in several hours. It's fun and doesn't overstay its welcome. I think it's well worth playing if you want the feeling of being inside a cartoon, and again the humour of it makes it very charming. Another charming moment: stick through to the end of the credits and you'll see photos of the real life children who inspired the main characters.
