You are a dwarf (an element almost entirely neglected by the story; it isn't clear whether you're in a land of dwarves or are unique in that respect) assigned by the Secret Service to hunt down a Magic Weaver who has disappeared. (Some hint of the tone of the game comes in the prologue, when you're instructed to retrieve the missing magician "so that he may entertain us further with his joyful sparkly spells.") You have no hint of his whereabouts until you stumble across him; the plot, typically, requires that you go out and solve puzzles, not actually track the guy down. Still, there is more than enough whimsy to keep the player entertained; among the better elements is a sarcastic talking cow and a reverend who speaks entirely in malapropisms. ("I never did heard such inscruciating nonsenseness in my whole lovely liveliness!") There is also some unintentional humor--one character's ability to parse input is limited enough to produce this exchange:
>mrs wisher, hello "Oh I'm sorry, dear," apologises Mrs Wisher. "I can't do that. The Reverend wouldn't approve."At least, I assume it was unintentional. The predominance of silliness, as opposed to coherent plot, is occasionally irritating, though--one character must be given an object simply because it's nonsensical, and your final action is more than a bit contrived.
The gameplay is slightly uneven; there are some actions whose syntax might defeat the less persistent, notably the problem of a certain well. At another point, in a dangerous situation, an escape route opens up for a turn or so--but the game gives you no hints to that effect. More generally, you steal a jar from a sweet shop (well, you take it in plain sight of a dimwitted salesman), and, as noted, several actions are more than a bit illogical. There are several well-coded features, though, notably characters who manage to move around without obvious bugs (at least, not very many), a series of candies that can be regenerated, and a hint system in the form of a magical door that leads you back to the central office. Though the game revolves around magic, your contact with it is limited--one instance--and the story depends more on the silly characters in the village than on the ostensible plot.
The central distinguishing feature of Lost Spellmaker is that you play a lesbian; you are attracted to the cute librarian Tilly, and the game tries--not very successfully--to resolve that along with the finding-the-lost-magician bit. The author has said that the game was underway before the argument this fall on gay characters in IF--in which his position was that a gay or lesbian main character, even if made obvious, did not have to be a political statement. As far as that goes, Lost Spellmaker demonstrates the truth of it; unless your biases are such that you see the inclusion itself as political, this game does not come across as trying to Make An Important Point or any such thing. But nor does it do much with the relationship; your interactions with Tilly are so limited that it would be hard to call this a lesbian romance, somewhat improbable ending aside. It is worth wondering whether such a game would feel like a political statement if the game encouraged you to act in a way expressing your attraction--along the lines of, say, Plundered Hearts. As it is, it's easy enough to forget that you're a lesbian--for that matter, to forget that you're female--for most of the game. This is certainly an interesting foray, but I'm not sure it answers many of the questions that the argument brought up--not that it was required to, of course. With more development in the romance area, this might be genuinely groundbreaking.
Lost Spellmaker is very short--six puzzles, by my count--and not all that remarkable, but it does manage to entertain (me, anyway, which is more than I can say for many humor games). As a demonstration of the viability of having a gay or lesbian main character, it's not particularly successful; it sends up the convention that the hero or heroine must be a strapping young thing, but that's a different problem. But it works well enough as a whimsical romp that I rated it a 7 on the competition scale.