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Tally ho, pip pip and other such nonsense. Nowadays the kids are too hopped up on their Pokemons and Michael Bay movies to give two toots of the vuvuzela about good old fashioned adventure. You know, exotic locales, mysterious ladies, treasure and all that jazz. Good thing that adventure game stalwarts Animation Arts, the developers of the popular Secret Files series, are giving it to us in spades in their upcoming release: Lost Horizon. This month I strapped on my flying goggles and played through a preview – and there wasn’t an Optimus Prime in sight.

We begin with a prologue in Tibet, 1936, where a British cartographer recieves a strange artifact from a dying Chinese man whilst being pursued by Nazis. After escaping a large chamber with bizarre writing etched into the walls we cut to China, 1938 and our hero Fenton Paddock, a loveable rogue who is talking to his bartender friend, Shen, about the trouble he has got himself into with the local Tong Triads.

After trying to chat up an up-tight singer Fenton has to distract the Tongs, who have just entered the nightclub and are guarding the door, so he decides to fill a wok with absynthe, set it alight and throw it across the crowded club. Classy, but it works. The controls are instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever played a point and click title before: left click to use, right click to look. Scrolling your cursor to the bottom of the screen brings up an inventory where you can select which items you want to use. With the flaming absynthe, I took the drink and clicked on a wok before selecting Fenton’s trusty lighter. Pressing the spacebar also shows you every clickable object in your surroundings, which is awfully handy and allows the painted backgrounds to remain unsullied by highlighted items.

Speaking of the visuals, Lost Horizon sports some beautiful painted backgrounds with lots of detail, juxtaposed with 3D character models that have a bright, cartoonish look about them. This is a damned nice looking game.

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