Lost in Random combines Nightmare Before Christmas, Alice in Wonderland, and Hand of Fate. It's pretty good.

Lost in Random is not the game I was expecting it to be. I thought this was going to be a combat focused action game with some story stuff thrown in around the edges. Instead it’s very much a story driven adventure game with some combat arenas. A lot of combat arenas. Too many combat arenas, really, but we’ll get to that a bit later. Lost in Random is the kind of AA game we don’t see a lot these days. It’s published by a major publisher (EA) but it’s not live service or one of the three approved genres (open world, shooter, sports). In many ways it resembles a late PS2 or early Xbox 360 game in that it’s a 12 hour single player adventure with some interesting and unique mechanics and a whole lot of really good story. If you miss those kinds of fun one-off experiences that have big publisher polish and budget in service of telling a good video game story then you might enjoy this one. With some caveats.

Lost in Random casts you as Even, a preteen girl living in the world of Random in the city of Onecroft, which is essentially one big junk yard where the people slave away stripping down the components of metallic junk and shipping it off to some unknown destination. The world of Random has fallen on hard times, ruled over by a brutal queen, with every citizen’s fate decided by a roll of her black die. One day the Queen’s henchwoman, Nanny Fortuna shows up to decide the fate of Even’s older sister, Odd, and the die rolls a 6, determining that she must depart for Sixtopia, never to see her family again. About a year later Even is visited by a ghostly apparition and decides to follow it out of Onecroft in order to find out what happened to her sister and maybe save her from some grisly fate. She soon stumbled upon the Valley of the Dice and gains a companion named Dicey, who gives her the power to use certain magical cards for combat. Apparently these sentient dice and cards were common in Random before the Queen went to war with the dice users and crushed them, killing off the dice and stripping everyone of their magic so she could institute tyranny. Everything in Random is themed after dice and board games, with each of the cities representing a face of the die and some kind of theme based around it (like everyone in Two-town having split personalities.) The Queen’s mantra is the double entendre “Random Rules!” which is both a cheer for the queendom itself and a statement about how arbitrary everything is under her rule. Will Even be able to use the power of the dice to track down the evil Queen, learn about what has driven her to become such a tyrant, and discover the fate of her beloved sister? Yes. Of course. This is a video game.

The story and writing in Lost in Random are really really good. As a story driven game this title lives or dies by its characters and fortunately there are a ton of memorable and fun people to meet on Even’s adventure. Even herself is an appealing heroine, plucky and strong but also with a childlike sense of whimsy, overconfidence, and at times chaotic mischievousness that makes her a delight in the authoritarian dystopia she inhabits. She’s voiced in cut scenes but during the game’s many conversations you get to choose many of her responses from a menu and those selections are not voiced, which is a bit jarring, but it also means that you get to define her personality a bit. I really enjoyed a lot of the inappropriate and off the wall things you can say and while these choices don’t really matter (with some of the NPC responses clearly designed to be appropriate to any choice) it made me feel connected to the character more than in most games. Much of your time is spent just wandering around various cities talking to NPCs and doing side quests, of which there are about half a dozen each in the game’s four main town areas, so if they’d messed the writing up this game would be terrible. Fortunately they didn’t. Almost everyone you meet is funny and interesting in some way, from the mayor who has an evil twin named Royam (it’s mayor backwards, you see) growing out of his head to the paranoid Count, who is convinced that you are an assassin but still wants you to find his missing stuffed toy. The best comparison to other media would be Nightmare Before Christmas, which this game clearly takes a lot of inspiration from in visual design, but it’s a little goofier and more off the wall than even that movie was.

Speaking of visuals, I think the game looks fantastic. It’s not the highest fidelity game and it is somewhat lacking in visual variety, with areas in each world blending together at the expense of navigation (this game could have used a mini map for sure!), but the design is really good and cohesive. Random looks like a fairytale place fallen on hard times, which it is, with lots of fantastical creatures standing around looking poor and disheveled. It’s clear there were lots of budget limits (some cut scenes feature characters actually doing things while in others they might say they’re rolling a die but not actually do that and it’s left to your imagination to fill in what’s happening) but they made due with what they had. Voice acting is good, though not every character has it, with some just having repetitive gibberish noises they make alongside the written texts. Dicey also speaks in gibberish, but there’s a running gag where it’s not translated and you basically get to choose what he says by choosing Even’s response. I should mention that the game also has a narrator who somewhat frequently breaks the 4^th wall, which I guess is a trend in gaming, but he’s pretty funny and not annoying, like some such narrators can be.

So if I like the look and sound of the game and loved the writing then this game has to be a slam dunk, right? That’s where the fly appears in the ointment. This is not an animated series, in which case it would be a good one, or a Henry Selick movie, which it looks like, it’s a game. It’s not fantastic to play. The adventure portions where you run around and talk to people are okay, but there’s not a ton to do in the world. You can move around, talk to folks, use your slingshot to break a bunch of vases with small amounts of coin in them, which are basically everywhere, send Dicey into little dice doors for more coins, and that’s about it. There are literally five “puzzles” in the game, and these take about 45 seconds to solve, generally involving stepping on a few pressure pads or shooting some switches with your slingshot. You have the ability to order Dicey to stand in certain places, which seems to have been in part designed for these sections, but it’s almost never used. The game looks kind of like a platformer but doesn’t play like one at all, and while I didn’t dislike running around talking to people it does get a bit tedious, as does shooting the various vases, which are hidden basically everywhere.

But that’s not the gameplay focus of this title. Instead the focus is on the battle arenas. There you control Even as she fights against the Queen’s robots and a few bosses along the way. In battle Even uses her slingshot to strike the weak points of various enemies. This doesn’t damage them but it does cause them to drop energy, which Dicey can pick up (either strapped on Even’s back or sent out on his own) and as you gather the energy you draw cards, up to 5 in your hand. Once you have a card you can roll Dicey and he gives you a certain number of action points to activate the cards (he can only roll a 1 or a 2 to start but eventually he gets up to being a full 6 sided die). The cards do things like manifest a weapon you can attack with, or drop a trap into the environment, or heal you, or create a cheat effect that might slow enemies down or cause them to take damage when you hit their weak points. You can customize your deck to include 15 cards (you can have duplicates if you want) so you can build Even pretty much however you’d like.

This system seems clever in theory but in practice it’s functional but pretty boring. The biggest issues are the lack of enemy variety and the fact that the cards aren’t all that powerful and don’t ‘feel’ great to use. There are about 10 enemy types you encounter over the course of the game, including robot birds, giant lumbering “rooks”, canon robots, sword robots etc… You’ll have seen all of them before you’re halfway done, and bosses don’t do much to mix things up, so the combat gets very samey pretty quickly. Likewise you’ll probably have a copy of every card in the game before the halfway point, so things stagnate well before the story is over. The combat isn’t hard, especially once you gain powerful healing abilities. I died a total of one time in combat throughout the entire 12 or so hour game. It’s just tedious, and the dice rolling mechanic can be very frustrating, especially against fast moving enemies who are hard to hit and get energy off of. When you roll a 1 on the die and can’t use any of the cards in your hand you might scream at the game in frustration because you’re not in any danger and you just want to end the battle and move on. At least I did. More than once. The cards themselves generally aren’t fun to use (except the Rulemaster’s bow, which fires satisfying explosive arrows) and many of them are functionally pretty useless, especially some of the traps that do minimal damage and disappear, making the optimal strategy to rely on a few effective cards over and over. This system needed more time in the oven, more cards and options to use, some unique cards to find in the world (you get cards from quests but they’re just copies of cards you can already buy so they’re almost always worthless at the point you get them) and just fewer encounters. There are way too many encounters. Dozens of them, and they’re boring and samey by the end. I don’t want to make the combat seem like torture because it mostly isn’t, but it’s very mediocre and there’s just way, way, too much of it.

I should note here that there is one variation on the combat I enjoyed, which takes the form of giant board games where your piece moves with every roll of the die. These movements can open up new areas or unleash effects on the playing field like birds carrying bombs or time bubbles, and the fact that you move towards your goal with each roll does a lot to ameliorate the frustration of bad rolls you get in normal combat because at least you’re advancing. There are a little over a half a dozen of these scenarios in the game and I wish that there were more, and fewer ‘normal’ combat arenas (of which there are dozens.) Weirdly the game abandons this idea about 2/3rds through and you won’t see any of these board games in the last two areas. They are sorely missed. I’m not sure if budget prevented them from implementing more of these (they each have unique rule sets, and it seems like there was the intent of maybe including more) or what, but if the game had focused more on these big board game battles and not on the little arena fights that would have done a lot to make the combat more engaging and enjoyable. As it is by the end of the game I was groaning every time I had to fight and wished that the game just had less combat, or at least more variety to what was there.

I still liked Lost in Random quite a bit. Narratively it hooked me pretty hard and was compelling enough for me to want to see it through. The world has all kinds of delightful details, like Mannie Dex, the man who turned his body into a store because he so loves cards that the only thing he likes to die is sell them, with you as his only customer (what he was doing before you came along is anybody’s guess.) He shows up in places he ought not to be and his lack of explanation as to why he’s there is delightful with the voice actor’s manic cheer trying to cover for the fact that the character himself knows that his presence makes no sense. Even is great, the areas you visit are unique and wonderful, and the plot itself makes sense and mostly resolves in a satisfactory manner. If there were just more puzzles to do, or less combat, or a few more unique cards for the late game, or even some more enemy variety this game would have been a home run for me. Instead it’s a fun but flawed adventure, especially for people who prize narrative above gameplay. This is another game, like The Gunk, that comes from a team whose 2D efforts I have enjoyed. I like this game more than The Gunk. It reminds me a lot of Alice: Madness Returns, which was also an EA published game featuring a young British girl and some steampunk aesthetic choices. I think this game has even better writing than that one, which was no slouch, but Alice was much more fun to play, so it’s the better overall game.

I wanted to love Lost in Random and I didn’t, but I’d still like to recommend it. These kinds of games don’t get made anymore, and I for one sorely miss them. It feels like I discovered a flawed but still hidden gem in the back of a dusty rental store. The world is something special and the action is unique, if kind of mediocre. I sort of marathoned it and I think that’s not the ideal way to play it because the monotonous combat really gets to you after a while. Playing it an hour or two a night or one day a week for a few hours is probably a better idea. But if you miss AA gaming and love good video game stories and worlds then this might be right up your alley. Pick up Lost in Random and you just might find a diamond in the rough.