Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is the latest entry in the emerging genre of mysteries based on retro tech and reading lots of documents. This one has you reading the internal wiki of a fictional Eastern European state rather than the usual internet or lost device exploration. Some pages are gated by passwords that you’ll get later in the story, but for the most part you can follow any link you see and get a few sentences of information about that topic. It’s a really neat concept, and I think there’s a lot of potential for another game to fully explore a wiki-based mystery, but Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is just too small to be effective.
Before we get to that, a few things the game does well. It’s incredibly atmospheric and really makes you feel like you’re using an early computer. Images are dithered, even small pages load in like you’re using an ancient network connection, and everything makes the right sounds to fit the era. The story it tells is not incredibly original, but I do like the setup of a small town with mysterious tragedies and wildly productive farms. Lastly, you get access to a flowchart that shows the links between every page on the wiki and lets you click into any article without needing to search for it. I love this and I hope more games in this genre start to use something like it. The exact setup might be hard to copy in a larger game with more interlinking, but being able to quickly find the page you’re looking for and go right there is great. It saves a ton of time that other games would make you waste clicking around to find the way back to a source.
Despite all that, Lost Wiki: Kozlovka failed for me because it’s ridiculously easy. The wiki only has like twenty pages and you can only use page titles as answers in your report, so there are generally only a couple of options for any given solution. Many reports have you fill in a name based on not much more than that person being the only one of the five names you have that makes any sense. When it does provide real evidence to work with, it’s usually so blunt that it may as well have just filled in the puzzle for you. You’re meant to feel like you’re uncovering a deep, century-long conspiracy, but it’s hard to feel like you’ve discovered anything when either leaping to conclusions from vague wiki pages or simply being given reports and letters that spell out exactly what happened. There needed to be more (any) red herrings to make you think and some articles that didn’t relate to the mystery at all so that you’d actually have to think about whether something is connected or not. As it is, a lot of people can probably figure out the entire mystery when the second report tells you “this town has incredible spikes in food production whenever there’s a tragedy near [fill in the blank].”
Conclusion
Lost Wiki: Kozlovka may be worthwhile if you just want to experience the atmosphere for an hour. As long as you don’t mind the low difficulty, it’s also a good option if you’d like a gothic horror story in an unusual setting. But if you’re primarily here for the mystery, Kozlovka doesn’t deliver.
Rating: 60%
Time to beat: Under 1 hour
Price: $5
For a similar game, see The Roottrees Are Dead Review – Genealogy the Hard Way or No Case Should Remain Unsolved Review – Plaintext Detective
Feel free to leave a question or comment below!
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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