Lost in Random Review – IGN

Imagine stepping into an original D&D setting that has been written with love and DM by Tim Burton or Shel Silverstein. Instead of elves and dwarves, you have a giant card store that is also a person, a decadent duke, and a scary-looking upside-down guy who only dreams of being able to rhyme, just to give a few examples. That’s the wildly creative premise of Lost in Random, a totally original action-adventure game that thinks outside of the box. Their combat runs out, but exploring their worlds never does.

You play as Even, one of two twin sisters, Even and Odd, who are destined to roll the Queen’s six-sided mystical dice at age 12. The resulting roll determines which of the six worlds in the realm of Random will spend the rest of their lives. Bottom line: Odd is sent to the Queen’s world, but Even is unwilling to let her go without a chase.

The world adventure that occurs after you manage to escape from Onecroft’s grim starting zone, has many nods to such films as The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Coraline, and other similarly gothic-inspired stop-motion films. Despite the entirety of Random being drenched in dark shades of black, green, and gray, each world still offers completely unique and decadent layered settings.

For example, the inhabitants of Two-Town have two directly opposite personalities that can change each time the Queen rolls her dice. This has resulted in the construction of a separate Two-Town, called the Upside-Downtown, which completely obscures the city skyline, sort of like that scene from Inception. It makes Two-Town feel that much more immense, and you can separate as much or as little of the area’s backstory as you like through side quests, or by talking to the many interesting NPCs that roam the city before continuing.

Meanwhile, Threedom and his people are trapped in a perpetual state of war by a series of petty disputes between the three outlandish Triplets. The other characters of the world, equally from another world, react to them in strange and unexpected ways that make you guess.

For example, they constantly tell you about the visually terrifying and appropriately named Shadowman from Lost in Random. You hear snippets about this terrifying monster lurking in the shadows and snatching lost children wandering too far from home, but when you finally meet him, he is frustrated because the war is too distracting and no one pays attention to him. This is just one of many ways that Random feels vivid and richly detailed.

And these otherwise creepy characters are made lovable through Lost in Random’s writing genius. Incredibly memorable characters like Mannie Dex, Seemore, Herman, Ooma, The Nanny, and many others make moving to the other world like watching the next movie in a 20-hour series of timeless Christmas classics.

Then there’s semi-real-time combat, which as you probably guessed from the name, relies heavily on dice and card rolls. It’s kind of like the combat system in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but it’s a bit simpler once you get used to these very random rules. You start each battle with your trusty slingshot, which allows you to shoot crystals from the faces and bodies of your enemies. Once you have collected enough, a new card will be added to your hand, up to a total of five cards.

Lost in Random – 10 screenshots

The part that makes this interesting is the fact that each card in your hand is randomly drawn from your much larger deck, allowing you to store up to 15 cards at a time, including duplicates if you want a few more cards to appear. regularly than others, and you have no way of predicting which cards will appear when you roll your dice. Don’t worry if this sounds too strange, because most of the cards you can equip in your deck include the usual combination of swords, healing potions, and bombs. The real-time portion of combat is triggered when you spawn a weapon and squeeze your enemies to death or until your weapon breaks.

All this “card” business would shuffle Lost in Random’s real-time combat and make it more attractive than the average button masher if the enemy’s AI weren’t so easy to outwit with such minimal effort.

There are two problems here. The first problem is that you are never asked to select a difficulty level unless you go deep into the menus after you’ve spent some time playing. The other issue is that, in the default difficulty mode, each enemy is packed with a lot of hit points, and a single battle can still take about 20 minutes or more, simply because of how many of them will appear before you’re done. . Regardless, each of these enemy types is pretty slow and predictable, and it’s easy to use any card that deals damage to take them down without thinking too much.

It feels great for the first few battles, especially when playing interesting card combinations like Blacksmith’s Blink and Crystal Curse; the former gives you the ability to deal damage when dodging enemies, causing crystals to break. of them, and the latter gives you the ability to deal damage every time you break those same crystals, but the novelty eventually wears off. The combat encounters end up popping up too often, slowing down the pace of the excellent story and dialogue sequences that make Lost in Random really shine.