Lost Wiki: Kozlovka

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is a detective game about searching a Wikipedia-like database to solve a string of mysterious tragedies. You have been hired to look into strange incidents that took place in a small Eastern European town, only to discover a long conspiracy. With light difficulty and a playtime of about two hours, this is a good approachable game for people who are interested in trying database investigation games.

The game’s interface is a retro computer system that resembles an Apple Macintosh. You receive a cryptic email asking you to research the town of Kozlovka and granting you access to a database of Wikipedia-style articles, accompanied by a small fill-in-the blanks puzzle asking you some basic information about the town. You can drag the titles of articles to fill in the blanks. When you correctly fill in a puzzle, you receive another email and a new puzzle, each one requiring you to dig deeper into the mystery.

You can explore the database by following internal links to new articles. There’s also a flowchart view that shows all the articles you’ve found and the web of connections between them, as well as flagging which articles link to pages you haven’t visited yet. Some pages are password-protected, while others have been edited to remove important passages. You’ll need to recover all the information to crack the case.

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is a horror game and contains disturbing themes, including references to animal death and mass murder. However, it does not contain jump scares or graphic imagery.

There is an optional hint system that can be toggled on. It adds an icon to the screen that lights up when the page you’re visiting contains one of the answer fields in the puzzle. This is a major spoiler though, so it’s off by default.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.