Lost But Found is a Hidden Object Game combined with job simulator developed and published by Rogue Duck Interactive. It was released on Steam on November 25, 2024.
You manage a Lost & Found kiosk at the airport, where you gather lost items from the conveyor belt and sort them out on the table. Passengers then approach you to ask for the missing items, and you have but a few seconds to find them and return them to them to earn tips. Sometimes you don't have the requested items, so your passengers can give you their numbers to call when you find what they need.
But as you work your shift, watch out for thieves and spray them with pepper spray before they steal your hard-earned money. However, you're not above becoming a criminal yourself, for you can steal items and auction them at the black market for a high price. Anything to do to earn more money to buy upgrades and especially provide for your family before your next shift, for if you fail to do the latter three times, you're fired.
Can you save $30,000 at the bank to go on a trip and win the game?
Tropes at the Lost & Found:
- Achievement Mockery: There are achievements for losing the game by failing to provide for your family or being robbed of all your money.
- Armed with Pepper Spray: You have pepper spray to stop thieves from stealing lost items or your money, but innocent passengers can be sprayed as well, sending them away but taking a hit on your reputation.
- Bandit Mook: Thieves steal your money when they show up at the counter, so you need to shoo them out with pepper spray.
- Bland-Name Product:
- One of the letters the Homeless Man sends you has him saying that he finally had a good meal at Burger Queen.
- One of the lost items you can put up in your kiosk is the Vapor Deck.
- Company Cross-References: There are multiple references to Dice & Fold, another game published by Rogue Duck Interactive: one of the shirts you can find has its logo, while there are plushies of the Weeping Stone and the Slimi and trading cards featuring the latter.
- Effortless Achievement: There are achievements for cleaning your first item, playing your first minigame, and completing your first day, all of which can be done in a span of three minutes.
- Exact Words: Some items look similar but are identified as different from each other. For example, a Hair Brush is different from a Wooden Hair Brush, and if a passenger asks for the former, giving them the latter will penalize you even though it's technically the same.
- Gotta Catch Them All: Some items have stickers on them, which you can collect and add to your collection to earn achievements. There are also achievements for buying all the upgrades from each shop.
- Guilt-Based Gaming: One letter the Homeless Man sends you says that he trusts you that you won't sell any lost item at the black market, which will make you feel bad if you have been doing that just to make ends meet.
- Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist: Among the missing souvenirs you find at the airport, one of them is a Hawaiian shirt.
- Hobos: You meet a Homeless Man on Day 3, who prefers being called mister. He asks you to give him anything in exchange for heartwarming notes.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: From easiest to hardest:
- Chill
- Relax
- Normal
- Mayhem
- Inventory Management Puzzle: The main gameplay loop. You take lost items from the conveyor belt and place them on the table, and you can rotate them to make them fit, then you find the correct item to give to the passenger when they ask for it. But as more items come in, they easily clutter the table, and you need to give them away or throw them out to make way for new ones. Failing to take an item out of the conveyor belt will force you to pay the fine for it when new items come in.
- iPhony: The Notebook Laptop looks like a Macbook but with a rubber duck logo on it.
- Loot Boxes: The Terminals Update adds booster packs in the shop, which give you random stickers for your collection.
- Luck-Based Mission: There are achievements for completing sticker collections, but the stickers you get from lost items and booster packs are random, so expect to grind through several runs just to get them all.
- Money Multiplier: Some upgrades increase the tips you get or your starting income when you begin the shift.
- Noodle Incident: In the tutorial, the security guard warns you not to let the conveyor belt pile up with items, "unless you want a reenactment of last year's 'Rubber Duck Avalanche' fiasco. Trust me, you don't."
- Notice This: If there are more than 30 items on the table, the trash bin flashes to remind you that you can declutter the table by discarding items without getting penalized.
- Playlist Soundtrack: The Terminals Update makes the BGM cycle between a few songs in levels instead of them only changing every level.
- Shout-Out:
- One item you can put up in your kiosk is a red-and-white hat that resembles Ash Ketchum's.
- The achievement for calling a passenger over to give them their lost item outside the tutorial is called "Call Me Maybe".
- The achievement for returning a kalimba to a passenger is called "Is mayonnaise an instrument?"
- Sound Test: The M4ZO Music Player lets you change the music during your shift.
- Themed Cursor: The custom cursor is a four-fingered white glove.
- Video Game Caring Potential: You can give the Homeless Man anything when he asks for one, and while you won't get any tips, he'll leave you a thank-you note.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: The Black Marketeer encourages you to steal some of the passengers' missing items and auction them at the black market for a high price. This is very tempting because you earn little from passenger tips alone, and you need to provide for your family before starting the next shift or else you lose the game if you fail to do it three times.
- Voice Grunting: Passengers and thieves make noises such as "huh", "aha", and "mm-hm" when they talk to you.
- Wire Dilemma: You can find Combination Lock Boxes that contain bombs. After opening one, you must cut the wires in the correct order: the mismatched ones before the matching ones, or else it explodes, making you lose the level.