Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition

Review

Game Description

“Embark on a journey through the Elusiverse, a realm of forgotten treasures and misplaced memories. As a scout for the Ministry of Lost Things, your mission is to find and return an item mistakenly taken from your world. To do so, you’ll need to uncover details about the item and its owner, navigating the landscape of a place where lost items weave a grand tapestry of stories.”

Personal Experience

Postcurious consistently makes some of the best puzzle game experiences in the industry. So anytime they drop a new experience on Kickstarter, it’s a must back for me. Ministry of Lost Things: Case 1: Lint Condition (I’m just going to call it MoLT from now on 😅) is the latest in their line and, as Case 1 implies, the first in a planned series of light-hearted adventures.

Impressively, the game arrived a few months before its expected ship date. (I say impressively and not surprisingly, because the Postcurious team seems to be consistently faster at getting games from backed to shipped than any other company I’ve backed on Kickstarter.) A few days after its arrival, I cracked open the small box, finding the introductory letter and the typical part-separating envelopes I’ve come to associate with a Postcurious experience. This time around the experience is played online, so I created a new account on the associated website¹In a nice touch, it’s a password-less experience, running off of magic links exclusively and dove right in. Overall it took about a little over three hours to reunite the lost object with its grateful owner.

Narrative

Postcurious’s experiences tend towards the historical and philosophical, this time around they released something very different: a pun-filled, whimsical adventure. It still has the same gorgeous art and thoughtful aesthetic touches that define a Postcurious experience, but adapted to a cute new setting. That setting is the Elusiverse, home to all the missing socks, spare change, and remote controls that constantly seem to be disappearing from our lives. Our items don’t make their way there on their own, they’re taken there by Gneesters, cute, little squishmellow-esque blogs that can travel between the two dimensions. It’s an adorably realized setting and one I’m excited to see continue in future adventures.

The game could have been satisfied to leave it at a cute setting— there’s a sentient sock named Woolliam and another named Reskeina George, that’s game of the year-level punnery right there!—but there’s also an excellent little story that the game reveals as its played. Taking a cue from the excellent indie game Unpacking, the game uses personal possessions—and the meaning they might have to somebody–to invite you to imagine the story behind the person they belong to. Much like they did with The Light in the Mist, I really enjoy seeing Postcurious experiment with different story-telling methods here. Their ability to experiment, gives each of their experiences their own unique identity.

While the game play is marshaled along via a website, the vast majority of the game takes place on the included components in the box. The website helpfully offers pdfs of materials that you may need to mark up, if you’re adverse to writing on game components. Though the game also includes a refill kit and each component that may need to be written on has a helpful pencil icon to indicate that a replacement is waiting in the kit.

Puzzle Play

Befitting its cuter story and packaging, the puzzles in MoLT are a little easier than in previous Postcurious puzzletales, but not too easy. A happy medium with a good amount of ‘Aha’ moments. I’d actually describe this game as the perfect on-ramp for players new to puzzle games who are looking to dip their toes in what Postcurious offers.

The puzzles are well-written and diverse and no two feel the same. They run the gamut from ciphering, to logic puzzles, to physical puzzles. Everything is excellently sign-posted—I never had an issue knowing what to do next. The game materials feel high quality, and the cardboard components that need to fit together do so nicely.

While one of the puzzles used color, I’m very pleased to say that it was a sterling example of how to use secondary identifiers to enable colorblind accessibility while still incorporating color into a puzzle. I had no difficulty at all solving it on my own.

Progressively hintier hints are available for every portion of the game. Since the website tracks your progress, it also cleverly only shows hints for the puzzles that you are currently working on.

Recommendation

Ministry of Lost Things: Case 1: Lint Condition is another delightful experience from PostCurious and one that I highly recommend. It is a smaller experience than most of the previous releases, but makes up for it by packing as much flavor and fun into it as possible. I’m very much looking forward to Case 2, whenever that may come about.

For new or younger players it acts as an excellent and affordable entry point into the Postcurious puzzletale experience. If you enjoy this game, you’ll almost certainly enjoy the rest of their games.