Go to hell, well that's where Irrational Games is planning to take PS2 gamers with The Lost. They may not be a well known company but they were involved with the making of the popular System Shock 2. The Lost however, will be their first PS2 game and takes players into the bowels of hell in a survival horror adventure game and will test your mind with many RPG elements as well.

The game will deliver a more in-depth storyline than in most console games and the environments will very much draw players deeply into the action because they are using a sophisticated renderer that works equally well for indoor and outdoor scenes. To give you an example of the game's depth, your character can build up skills, grow and become stronger the further into the game they go. This will allow the player to approach problems from many angles. Although there will be a lot of choice and direction of character development, the developers say the interface will not have players sifting through screen after screen, it will be a user friendly interface.

The basic outline of the story goes something like this. There is a woman named Amanda Wright who loses her young daughter in an accident. Amanda becomes overwhelmed with grief, then somehow she summons Satan and he allows her to go into hell to return her daughter to the world of the living. So now you're probably thinking....ohhh hell, how scary, big deal right? Well when Amanda arrives in hell, things are not how she expected. In fact, it is a very different sort of place than the fiery inferno so many people vision. At the start of the game, Amanda has no powers and low skill levels so players must start from the bottom and work their way up the skill ladder. There are many items and things that you can earn throughout the game like better weapons, ranged and non-ranged, offensive/defensive moves that can be improved with time. Along her journey, she will find three entities, Light, Shadow, and Corruption. Light represents the positive, good things, Shadow is somewhere in the middle, neither good or bad and Corruption is just plain evil. Once found, she can transform into these entities. Each one will allow you to do certain things that the others can't do. This allows the complex interface to be broken down into separate characters with unique abilities so they aren't all jammed into one character's repetoir.

The game environment consists of hell as you might have already guessed and hell is comprised of nine different themed "circles". These circles of hell each represent a different sin. So there is a level about Corruption, Greed, Violence, etc. This type of setup lets the developers create varied levels with very different appearances. There are many indoor and outdoor areas that flow seamlessly together. The Lost also uses the LithTech engine. They choose to use this one because it is very good at doing animation with characters. The advantage with this engine is that different body parts can animate independently resulting in a much more realistic flow of movement for the characters. It also supports hand animation which is good for models that you can't mo-capture....like demons, three headed creatures and such. Unfortunately I couldn't find many screenshots of the game in action but there are a few character models like the one of Amanda which if you see it, you'll notice how amazingly detailed the models are. Smooth and rounded edges really add to the realism but the texture detail is also really stunning. This looks like a great combination for some very good looking cut-scenes. These models look like they could show lots of emotion to help articulate the story to the players.

In the game, players will have complete control over the camera which is a welcomed feature over those glitchy computer controlled cameras. This will also allow players to explore in every nook and cranny in the levels because they are in control. And you will need to explore and look around a lot to find things and solve mysteries in these massive environments. Like I said before, the levels are themed by sins. For example, the Circle of Violence level looks like WWII back in the 40's. The demons look sort of like soldiers with gas masks on. This is the way the other levels work as well, they are like an eerie reflection of reality whether it be passed or present.

Although many of the detail on the plot of the game aren't yet known, one of Amanda's missions is to save "The Lost", the people who are in hell but shouldn't be. You must find and help these people out of hell and when you do, you are treated to a cut-scene of how they died....in 1st person perspective!

The development team is very excited about the challenge of working on a system as powerful as the PS2 mainly because most of their experience is on the PC. But they seem to have bold plans for The Lost. They will now be able to really flex their muscle of talent on this system. The characters in the game are made up of over 10,000 polygons each whereas passed titles like System Shock 2 only had 280 per model. I am also excited about this title, I think it's going to be one of the better games to hit the PS2. It has a more mature storyline, a sinister and unsettling background kind of like a good horror movie only it's interactive. Keep an eye out for this one.