Tag: ministry of lost things

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.

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”.

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.