Your passage as leader of the Lost Tribe will be the most difficult challenge you've ever faced.
— Game intro
An edutainment game created by Lawrence Productions, Inc. in 1992 for Apple I Igs, DOS, and Macintosh.
When the volcano a prehistoric tribe call their home erupts, leaving them homeless, the survivors decide to make a long journey to the fabled home of their ancestors. As the best hunter of the tribe, your role is to lead them across a hexagonal grid of forests, plains, and mountains to their new home, hunting, gathering, and managing the tribe's happiness along the way. But you must go quickly - once winter arrives, it will become much harder to find food, and your chances of success will sharply decline.
Every space has different levels of food and danger, and you must balance your time and resources with care. Random events will crop up periodically to make the going easier, harder, or funnier.
Despite its primitive graphics and simple gameplay, The Lost Tribe holds up fairly well thanks to its goofy sense of humor and brutal difficulty. The game pulls no punches - expect to fail many times on each scenario before you learn how to lead the tribe.
Not to be confused with Lost Tribe.
Tropes in The Lost Tribe:
- Anachronism Stew: As an Edutainment Game, the setting and plot points are fairly realistic for the most part, but much of the game's humor derives from absurd anachronisms, such as a spontaneous election to decide who should be the hunter-gatherer tribe's "drain commissioner" or one of the tribesfolk declaring himself a corporation to avoid taxes.
- Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Inverted For Laughs - Piltdown wears *a tie*. And no shirt.
- Brawn Hilda: Gurble, according to her profile, was once speared by a hunter who mistook her for a bear, but fortunately caught the spear in her teeth and ground it to a pulp. In some random events, she may ask to go hunting on her own.
- Born in the Wrong Century: Bloog wants to open up a university, and B'karr the shaman wanted to be a lawyer when he was younger. These are prehistoric hunter-gatherers, in case you've forgotten.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: Glurg, according to his profile.
- Chekhov's Volcano: One erupting kicks off the plot. Reaching another volcano is the game's main goal.
- Closer to Earth: Gnarf, the medicine woman. She will also warn you when the rest of the tribe is grumbling against you.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Hunting mammoth. You will need to have a lot of hunting experience and luck to hunt them successfully, but they provide an immense windfall of food.
- The Ditz: Gupf is more or less described as this.
- Experience Meter: The entire tribe has a single meter displaying their collective hunting skill. Successful hunts provide a bit of experience, but you can increase experience faster by spending a day to practice, at the cost of not collecting any food or traveling that day.
- Expressive Health Bar: The tribe's mood level is displayed as a happy face that gradually grows sadder as you fail to provide for the tribe's needs.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: There is no direct connection between the named characters that show up in random events and the faceless stick-figures that represent your tribe's members during normal gameplay. While it can be presumed that some of them are the named characters, named characters will never, for example, die during a hunt.
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Genius Bonus: In one random event, a man named "Piltdown" emerges from the forest and claims to have been living there for "a thousand years" and knows secrets to make you "rich beyond your wildest dreams". The other tribesmen state that he seems like a fraud. "Plitdown Man" was a famous paleoanthropological fraud, a fabricated fossil of a prehistoric hominid. - Hold Your Hippogriffs: Burgle sometimes derisively refers to your leadership as a "wild boar chase".
- Hulk Speak: Averted in dialogue - the prehistoric folk are perfectly articulate in what is presumed to be their own language - but characters are given names like Grakk, Glurg, Burgle, etc.
- The Load: Several members of the tribe seem basically useless except as comic relief, but especially Burgle, who does little but attempt to undermine your authority. There is even a part where he threatens to leave the tribe - if you let him, he just comes back.
- Luck-Based Mission: When you choose to search for food, you must divide the tribe into hunters and gatherers. Hunting provides better payoff when successful, but success rates may vary substantially, and depending on what you are hunting, can result in the death of your hunters. Gathering is a more reliable source of sustenance, but rarely produces a surplus. Balancing risk is one of the core aspects of gameplay.
- Mauve Shirt: Recurring characters that have written profiles generally don't die. If a named character with no profile page shows up in a random event, their survival is not guaranteed.
- Meaningful Name: Burgle will "steal" your position of leader if you don't keep the tribe happy.
- Medium Blending: Random events are generally displayed as still photographs of live-action actors, occasionally with a small amount of animation. Other cutscenes are rendered as animated cave paintings.
- Morale Mechanic: Your authority level and the tribe's happiness are tracked by two separate meters. The tribe's unhappiness will cause your authority to decline faster, but other events can increase or decrease it. When the tribe loses all confidence in your abilities, it's Game Over.
- Nominal Importance: While tribesmen occasionally die during hunts or traveling through dangerous terrain, none of these are ever named, and named characters will never turn out to be among those who died during normal gameplay.
- Non-Standard Skill Learning: Maps sometimes contain ruins or caves, often a short walk off the beaten path. These areas sometimes contain paintings that will teach your tribe new techniques for hunting specific animals.
- Opportunistic Bastard: Burgle is always looking for an opportunity to turn the tribe against you. Lose too much respect, and he will succeed.
- The Philosopher: Bloog is described as the tribe's "intellectual", but he mostly spends his time pondering questions like why the mountains rise so high.
- The Promised Land: The objective of the game is to reach the fertile volcano where your ancestors used to live. You may need to check several volcanoes before you find one.
- Stalked by the Bell: The countdown in the lower-left displays the days remaining until winter. When it hits zero, it will begin counting negative numbers, and hunting/gathering will become less successful until it is impossible to keep the tribe fed. This forces you to hurry instead of remaining in areas with plentiful food to build up your stockpiles and experience.
- Stylistic Suck: Icons, menu options, and cutscenes are rendered as cave paintings. Cutscenes are animated cave paintings.
- Yet Another Stupid Death: Declare a hunt for an animal in the wrong biome - such as bison in a forest, or fish in an area with no water - and Burgle will quickly take the opportunity to call you out on it and convince some of your hunting party to hunt another animal with him. If he leads a successful hunt, you can kiss a fair chunk of your reputation goodbye, which can easily cost you the game.
