Lost in Play

Lost in Play is a point-and-click adventure game in which the player controls two young siblings, Gal and Toto, as they engage in a session of imaginative make-believe around their house and a fantastical representation of their neighborhood. How to progress through the game is conveyed through cartoon-style visuals and gameplay, as no dialogue or narration is present in the game. Characters, including both the children and non-player characters such as neighbors, birds, goblins, and monsters communicate in a gibberish language or use gestures, pictorial symbols, and noises to communicate.

The game is divided into 15 episodes, or scenes, such as the children's house, a park with a giant bird, the bottom of the ocean, and a goblin village. Scenes sometimes repeat thematic elements, such as goblins, frogs, and a magic crown, but the settings are often largely unrelated to each other. The first half of the game follows the children venturing out of their house to play, while the second half has them following a map back to their home before nightfall. In each episode the player controls one of the children—or on occasion swaps between both—and moves them around the areas of a scene, collecting items and solving puzzles with them.

Lost in Play was developed by Happy Juice Games, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based studio, as its first game over the course of three and a half years. It was designed by studio co-founders Yuval Markovich, Oren Rubin, and Alon Simon, who were the principal developers of the game. Rubin and Simon were animators and designers who had previously worked on The Office Quest, a 2018 point-and-click adventure game, while Markovich was a programmer and founder of mobile game developer Nitako Games. The team wanted to create a game with a high degree of quality, but did not add any other developers during the initial phases to keep costs low. The trio initially felt that the project would take around half a year to complete, but then spent the first year of development self-funding a prototype, before looking for funding and a publisher.

After initial discussions with publishers fell through during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Happy Juice Games began promoting the game itself on social media to attract attention. They were discovered by Justin Berenbaum, manager of a project by video game financial technology company Xsolla to connect developers with investors. When Xsolla partnered with venture capital company Nazca to form the publisher Joystick Ventures, it agreed to fund and publish Lost in Play, which was first announced in early 2022. With the funding, Happy Juice Games hired additional staff, including writers, programmers, animators, musicians, and voice actors.

Lost in Play won the Developer Choice Award at the 2022 IndieCade Awards, and was nominated for the Best Visual Design category at the 38th Golden Joystick Awards and Family Game of the Year at the 26th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. After its release for iOS, it was awarded Best iPad Game by Apple in the 2023 App Store Awards and won the Innovation category at the 2024 Apple Design Awards.

Critics were "generally favorable" towards the game, according to the review aggregator Metacritic. The gameplay was praised, with Roland Ingram of Nintendo Life and Katharine Castle of Rock Paper Shotgun noting the "constant novelty" and variety of puzzles along with their integration into the game world. Nintendo Life also praised the hint system for being helpful without giving away too much. Catherine Dellosa of Pocket Gamer and Alex Orona of Nintendo World Report added that the game was well-paced, keeping the player in constant motion through the scenes for around five hours, though Daniele Cucchiarelli of Eurogamer.it felt that was too short. Opinions were mixed on the difficulty of some of the game's puzzles, especially due to the child-friendly aesthetics; Pocket Gamer and Alessandro Alosi of IGN Italia found the game "not particularly demanding", but Nintendo World Report felt that a few puzzles had illogical or obtuse solutions, while Nintendo Life, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Eurogamer.it said instead that some puzzles may be too difficult for children to solve on their own.