You ever come across something that not only has its own unique touch to something but which feels tailormade just for you, like this quirky idea came directly from your own brainstorming/daydreaming session - and then you realise it doesn't actually translate as well into reality as it did in your imagination?
Before we get to that, I do have to highlight that Lost in Random is a good game, and perhaps above all an immacutely presented one. Everything from the art style to how it's realised through the graphics and from the environmental design to the supremely well done voice acting (with its cavalcade of regional British accents to boot!) is genuinely incredible. Zoink Games' release history prior to Lost in Random mainly involves a lot of mobile games and random minor releases, but this game - their big break of sorts - came to fruition through EA's "EA Originals" scheme and the studio have put their big budget backing into good use by making sure they present their vision as superbly as they can. The style is obviously indebted to Tim Burton's fever dreams (though in strictly video game terms I'd say Psychonauts x American McGee's Alice, though of course both owe magnitudes to Burton themselves), but Zoink have created a world that feels their own. The world of Random is split into six realms under the six sides of a die and they all bring something unique to the world and the story that makes you want to explore each of them: some are seemingly inconspicuous, some inherently surreal, others quietly sad. The atmosphere, too, is very well crafted and all in all, it's an enchanting world to traverse.
The basic gameplay of Lost in Random is simple: a young girl called Even haphazardly wanders through the world of Random in search of her sister Odd, captured by the evil Queen who conquered Random years ago and twisted it into a pained shade of its former self. Even explores the various hub areas and "dungeon" sequences in third person, doing simple side quests, picking up limited amounts of collectibles and smashing countless posts for errant cash - all very familiar from many 3rd person action platformers, though this time with less platforming given Even can't jump on command. Instead, the big focus in-between all the story parts and ad hoc character conversations is the combat. And that's when you get to those bits I referred to in the first paragraph.
The combat of Lost in Random is built around a deck of cards that Even accrues throughout her journey, forming them into a 15-strong hand that she takes to combat: these cards provide her with all the weapons, traps, buffs, debuffs and crowd control that she needs to defeat the Queen's robot army, and for the player to come up with their strategies based on personal preference. Even can use her perfunctory sling shot to break crystals that appear on enemy bodies, the energy from which she can use to draw 1-5 cards from her hand when she rolls her anthropomorphic die pal Dicey. Depending on the side Dicey lands, she gets 1-6 points to use on the random cards her hand has assigned to her this throw (each with their own value) and the world around her freezes when you devise a strategy and position Even where you best want her to be. And... well, I not only love deck builders, but one of my favourite game mechanics is having to devise strategies out of semi-random variables and with the time freeze you ever get a vague sense of turn-based combat. You couldn't come up with a recipe that I'd gobble up more heartily and I couldn't believe my luck when I first learned about this mechanic after going into the game blind.
The problem is, the more you play the more the combat becomes something you actively want to avoid. It's novel and fun for the first few chapters as you're learning your tricks, acquiring your cards and playing around with them and slowly getting more adept at forging combos. It's also really slow (both because of how it operates but also because each combat sequence features multiple waves) and you start to feel that more strongly the further you get in the game. The pool of cards you can find/unlock is shockingly small and you can easily run out of new tricks to discover by the halfway point, and though the game tries to hide this by giving you multiples of the same card to bulk up the roster, with a 15-card hand limit the idea of adding duplicates into your hand (beyond the "+1/2 free points" cards) doesn't seem worth it. This also means you stop experimenting and it's dreadfully easy to fall into the most utilitarianly effective hand well before you reach the end. The combat also always starts like a chore and boring with Even having to chip away the crystals to scrounge card energy without doing any damage to the enemies, and you're stuck doing this until your hand finally graces you with the tools you need to actually kill (which in return gives you more crystal energy so you can keep the flow going). A few times during the game they'll try and spice up the combat by adding light puzzle mechanics, but this always boils to down having to face limitless enemies with arbitrary stops in-between. The boss battles are particularly sluggish in this regard as you find yourself repeating the same actions over and over again for 10-15 minutes (pro-tip, use the poison DOT card because the poison continues to run even during mid-fight cutscenes). It's a whole monkey's paw situation of genuinely excellent ingredients turning into a middle-of-the-road recipe, and you can't really avoid it because besides some side quests which are largely just "talk to x character and report back to y", the combat is the primary gameplay element of the whole experience (though you can tone the difficulty down to make it breezier if you want to speed things up).
It leaves me with slightly conflicting feelings about the game as a whole. It's a good game and I genuinely loved exploring the new realms and finding more whimsical characters to speak to, but after a point every time I encountered an obvious battle arena I audibly sighed in pre-emptive boredom. There's a wonderful idea there but it just needs more balancing or simply just more of everything - different cards, hand limit upgrades, enemy variety. Still, the overall feeling I left the game with was more positive than negative, and given this drops in discounts to around a fiver regularly, the barrier to entry is minimal. If you love whimsical worlds crafted with love and full of character, Random is a great place to get lost in - just be mindful of the occasional traffic jams of robots wanting to murder you.
Few random FYIs. One, the game doesn't allow control customisation so if you don't do WASD, you need to get your gamepad out. Two, even if you get this on Steam the game will still launch through EA Origin (Steam will simply give the command to launch the game through Origin), so just be mindful of that.
Before we get to that, I do have to highlight that Lost in Random is a good game, and perhaps above all an immacutely presented one. Everything from the art style to how it's realised through the graphics and from the environmental design to the supremely well done voice acting (with its cavalcade of regional British accents to boot!) is genuinely incredible. Zoink Games' release history prior to Lost in Random mainly involves a lot of mobile games and random minor releases, but this game - their big break of sorts - came to fruition through EA's "EA Originals" scheme and the studio have put their big budget backing into good use by making sure they present their vision as superbly as they can. The style is obviously indebted to Tim Burton's fever dreams (though in strictly video game terms I'd say Psychonauts x American McGee's Alice, though of course both owe magnitudes to Burton themselves), but Zoink have created a world that feels their own. The world of Random is split into six realms under the six sides of a die and they all bring something unique to the world and the story that makes you want to explore each of them: some are seemingly inconspicuous, some inherently surreal, others quietly sad. The atmosphere, too, is very well crafted and all in all, it's an enchanting world to traverse.
The basic gameplay of Lost in Random is simple: a young girl called Even haphazardly wanders through the world of Random in search of her sister Odd, captured by the evil Queen who conquered Random years ago and twisted it into a pained shade of its former self. Even explores the various hub areas and "dungeon" sequences in third person, doing simple side quests, picking up limited amounts of collectibles and smashing countless posts for errant cash - all very familiar from many 3rd person action platformers, though this time with less platforming given Even can't jump on command. Instead, the big focus in-between all the story parts and ad hoc character conversations is the combat. And that's when you get to those bits I referred to in the first paragraph.
The combat of Lost in Random is built around a deck of cards that Even accrues throughout her journey, forming them into a 15-strong hand that she takes to combat: these cards provide her with all the weapons, traps, buffs, debuffs and crowd control that she needs to defeat the Queen's robot army, and for the player to come up with their strategies based on personal preference. Even can use her perfunctory sling shot to break crystals that appear on enemy bodies, the energy from which she can use to draw 1-5 cards from her hand when she rolls her anthropomorphic die pal Dicey. Depending on the side Dicey lands, she gets 1-6 points to use on the random cards her hand has assigned to her this throw (each with their own value) and the world around her freezes when you devise a strategy and position Even where you best want her to be. And... well, I not only love deck builders, but one of my favourite game mechanics is having to devise strategies out of semi-random variables and with the time freeze you ever get a vague sense of turn-based combat. You couldn't come up with a recipe that I'd gobble up more heartily and I couldn't believe my luck when I first learned about this mechanic after going into the game blind.
The problem is, the more you play the more the combat becomes something you actively want to avoid. It's novel and fun for the first few chapters as you're learning your tricks, acquiring your cards and playing around with them and slowly getting more adept at forging combos. It's also really slow (both because of how it operates but also because each combat sequence features multiple waves) and you start to feel that more strongly the further you get in the game. The pool of cards you can find/unlock is shockingly small and you can easily run out of new tricks to discover by the halfway point, and though the game tries to hide this by giving you multiples of the same card to bulk up the roster, with a 15-card hand limit the idea of adding duplicates into your hand (beyond the "+1/2 free points" cards) doesn't seem worth it. This also means you stop experimenting and it's dreadfully easy to fall into the most utilitarianly effective hand well before you reach the end. The combat also always starts like a chore and boring with Even having to chip away the crystals to scrounge card energy without doing any damage to the enemies, and you're stuck doing this until your hand finally graces you with the tools you need to actually kill (which in return gives you more crystal energy so you can keep the flow going). A few times during the game they'll try and spice up the combat by adding light puzzle mechanics, but this always boils to down having to face limitless enemies with arbitrary stops in-between. The boss battles are particularly sluggish in this regard as you find yourself repeating the same actions over and over again for 10-15 minutes (pro-tip, use the poison DOT card because the poison continues to run even during mid-fight cutscenes). It's a whole monkey's paw situation of genuinely excellent ingredients turning into a middle-of-the-road recipe, and you can't really avoid it because besides some side quests which are largely just "talk to x character and report back to y", the combat is the primary gameplay element of the whole experience (though you can tone the difficulty down to make it breezier if you want to speed things up).
It leaves me with slightly conflicting feelings about the game as a whole. It's a good game and I genuinely loved exploring the new realms and finding more whimsical characters to speak to, but after a point every time I encountered an obvious battle arena I audibly sighed in pre-emptive boredom. There's a wonderful idea there but it just needs more balancing or simply just more of everything - different cards, hand limit upgrades, enemy variety. Still, the overall feeling I left the game with was more positive than negative, and given this drops in discounts to around a fiver regularly, the barrier to entry is minimal. If you love whimsical worlds crafted with love and full of character, Random is a great place to get lost in - just be mindful of the occasional traffic jams of robots wanting to murder you.
Few random FYIs. One, the game doesn't allow control customisation so if you don't do WASD, you need to get your gamepad out. Two, even if you get this on Steam the game will still launch through EA Origin (Steam will simply give the command to launch the game through Origin), so just be mindful of that.