Ministry of Lost Things Lint Condition, next to the newest installment Finders Keypers

Last year, ARGNet reviewed the first installment in PostCurious’ episodic puzzle series, The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition. The series of puzzle games center around the “Elusiverse”, a world filled with the lost and forgotten objects from our world enter when they’re misplaced. The crowdfunding campaign ultimately invited over 4,000 backers to join the Department of Returns as scouts, looking to return lost objects of sentimental value to their humans.

PostCurious is back crowdfunding for its second installment of the series, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keepers. The newest release is just as whimsical and lighthearted as the last, and packed full with so much wordplay, you could almost be excused for thinking the game’s dozen or so puzzles were just an excuse to inflict a series of tortured puns on players.

The gneesters, who happily rehome lost objects into the Elusiverse…even if means a lot to you

A Surprisingly Heartfelt Story for a Relatively Tiny Box
With the first installment of Ministry of Lost Things, finding out what object went missing was an element of the first puzzle. For Finders Keypers, things start out with a more explicit task: Cary the Carabiner ended up detached from her owner Jenna’s bag, and all of the keys she was securing became scattered. As a scout for the Department of Returns, it’s your job to traverse the Elusiverse collecting witness statements and solving puzzles to find the lost objects, learning along the way why they’re more than just keys to Jenna.

And every square inch of that heartfelt story is packed with more puns than you’re prepared to handle. One of the game’s early puzzles does a particularly good job of exemplifying this: starting off in The Keys (a location initially teased in the game’s first installment), Department of Returns scouts are tasked with tracing down the carabiner’s path through a series of islands that weaves through “Rock” and “Hard Place”, past “Key Largo” and its nearby counterpart “Key Smaller”, and past a series of islets like “Doss Isle, Grocery Isle, and Rept Isle”.

Early puzzle components from Ministry of Lost Things (some pieces omitted to prevent online solving)

If your reaction to that map is more of a chortle than a wince, this is the game for you since that’s the type of whimsy that saturates every part of the game, whether it contributes to the puzzle solving or not. There may be a dozen puzzles to this game, but there’s easily over a hundred literary flourishes, making this just as much a pun-laden successor to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels as it is a puzzle game.

Streamlined Structure Made with Logic Puzzle Lovers in Mind
Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keypers is structured around five “Transmissions” centered around for the hunt for the missing keys at the center of this mystery. Each transmission will include 2-3 separate puzzles with one challenge focused around locating the missing key, and another about uncovering why it was so significant to Jenna. And priced at $26 for the game, the Ministry of Lost Things games remain PostCurious’ most affordable product offering.

Logic puzzles are frequently a highlight in PostCurious games, but Ministry of Lost Things leans in particularly heavily on the format in order to fit an entire multi-part adventure into a box the size of a tarot deck. That is not to say the puzzles are repetitive. While logic puzzles do account for almost half of the game’s puzzles, each one feels fresh and distinct, introducing unique rules and mechanics. The puzzles just happen to lean heavily on types designed to satisfy fans of Murdle who wished the game had a little more variety or a stronger tactile element to the solving process.

By way of example: one of the more delightful logic puzzles in Finders Keypers involves figuring out the physical traits of a certain object using descriptions from witness testimony. However, that standard logic puzzle structure is complicated by a fun and thematic twist: none of the witnesses are reliable, with each one getting a single detail wrong.

Some of the components used in Finders Keypers, from the campaign Kickstarter page

To be clear, this is not a pen-and-paper puzzle box: practically every puzzle (whether it’s a logic puzzle or not) involves moving around game pieces in creative and frequently unexpected ways, and the game’s final puzzle delivers a particularly satisfying reveal that resonates at both puzzle and narrative levels.

The Kickstarter campaign has already funded, and will be running through the morning of October 30th. And as is PostCurious tradition, the campaign is also releasing a series of four weekly puzzles so PostCurious-curious backers can get a sense of what their puzzles are like. This time, four people who successfully solved all the puzzles will win a preview copy of the game, to join the Department of Returns even earlier.

So check out The Ministry of Lost Things on Kickstarter soon, for both puzzle puns and preview prizes. The game is a standalone game so you don’t need to play Lint Conditions first, but there’s also an option to buy both games through the campaign.

Note: ARGNet received a review copy of Ministry of Lost Things.