It’s very easy to describe how Lost In Random looks – imagine Tim Burton’s stop-motion work stretched across the skeleton of a high fantasy world – but a lot harder to explain how it plays. Even in its early stages, that’s absolutely to its credit; Swedish developer Zoink! (Fe, Stick It to The Man) is making something that plucks some very specific, very disparate heartstrings – claymation movies and deck-building tabletop games – and the tune it’s playing on them is already sounding unexpectedly sweet.
Lost In Random’s world is essentially a feudal system built on dice rolls – every citizen throws a magic die on their twelfth birthday, with chance deciding their future. Roll a one and you’ll be sent to the sunken slums of Onecroft, roll a six and you’re welcomed into the heavenly Sixtopia, with a different town for every number in between. But the game’s hero, Even, begins to suspect the game may be rigged after her older sister Odd rolls a six and is ripped away from her family of Ones, and seemingly sends a ghostly call for help.
What follows is an escape from her assigned home, as Even meets a living, magic die (named Dicey, naturally) and they team up for a journey through all six of Random’s realms – two of which I had the chance to play through in a roughly three-hour hands-on. It’s impossible not to notice Lost In Random’s art style first, with its world not just looking like, but moving like its animated movie inspirations (and how many games can you say remind you of Nightmare Before Christmas more than anything else?). But spending even a little time in the game’s world – full of curiously elongated humans, glum fish-men, and a giant mayor with an evil twin sprouting out of his hat – reveals that it’s living up to that comparison in spirit, too.
Just like its movie references, this feels like a kid-friendly fairytale with an appealingly dark heart. One early sidequest asks you to solve a conflict between two sides of one man’s personality – half of him is emotional, the other half logical. Except the answer here isn’t to mediate between them – it’s to collect tiny, screaming slime-animals so that your chosen half can blend them into a potion and chemically destroy their rival. It’s never graphic, or outwardly grim, but there’s enough at work under the surface of Lost In Random’s population to give you pause.
But no matter how odd its characters might be, combat is where Lost In Random reveals its true strangeness. The game’s told as a broadly linear story, with the major locations unfolded into hub worlds of sorts, peppered with sidequests and collectibles – but tying it all together are fights with Even’s enemies, those trying to stop her reaching Sixtopia for reasons unknown. In appearances, these fights take on the form of a third-person action game, but in reality Lost In Random plays like no action game I’ve laid my hands on. Every battle begins with Even as a practically powerless figure, equipped with a slingshot that does no damage, and a dash ability to escape foes. Both of those harmless abilities can, however, pop the blue crystals that grow periodically out of every one of the game’s enemies. Here’s where it gets weird.
All of Even’s other abilities, from conjuring spectral swords, to spawning traps, to buffing her own stats, are attached to a deck of cards that you build and maintain over the course of the game. Smashing enemy crystals allows you to draw those cards and, once you’ve drawn them, Even can roll Dicey – which immediately slows the real-time combat to a crawl. The number Dicey lands on is essentially the mana you have to spend on your cards – if he lands on a three, for instance, you could spawn a sword (1 mana) and drop a bomb trap (2 mana), using the slowed time to pop it down between three enemies, before scurrying away and firing a slingshot pellet into it to set it off as time returns to its normal pace.
In the game’s early stages at least, it must be said that combat never advances beyond being fairly sluggish – although hits and dashes themselves do at least have some of the cartoon whip and impact you’d hope for from an action game. That decision’s presumably been made so as not to alienate less skilled players, and to make building a good deck the major consideration as you progress. Even by the end of my three hours with the game, the malleability and importance of that deck-building system was already clear to me.
The first time I scrapped the game’s basic deck and rebuilt it, I focused on traps – allowing myself to set off bouncing projectiles and summon up gigantic hands that slapped enemies to the ground. It worked nicely enough, but I’d skimped on regular weaponry, and fairly frequently found myself unarmed and escaping from hordes of partially damaged enemies while I worked up enough energy to build another set of traps. After a visit to the game’s card merchant (a man who either lives inside, or just is part-wardrobe), I was far more tooled-up, and built a deck that balanced offense with trickery, at the expense of healing items.
It was genuinely thrilling to see how those little changes made a difference to combat – just like a board or card game, Lost In Random feels like a tug of war between elements of chance (the cards you draw, the dice you roll), and player skill (the deck you build, and the way you utilise those cards). My suspicion, and my hope, is that the game introduces more and more complex cards as time goes on, balancing Dicey’s increasing power (you can only roll up to a 3 by the end of the game’s second chapter) with decks that turn Even into wildly different kinds of fighter.
All of this comes before you get to the special rounds of combat that turn the fights into a literal board game, with Dicey’s rolls also controlling a giant playing piece, travelling across spaces and offering effects and new threats with every move. I only tried a couple of these, but they felt charmingly frantic – although I’m hoping the rules get a little more complex as time goes on.
I’m sure there will be some for whom the inherent randomness of all this will frustrate more than charm – getting a few unlucky draws and rolls in a row can leave you feeling more vulnerable than you might expect – but for me it plays perfectly into the game’s central ideas.
Like its protagonist, Lost In Random feels as though it’s refusing to accept the rules of the world it’s being born into. In an industry built on games that tend to build on established ideas, Lost In Random already feels like it’s trying to be something new. It looks different, and it plays differently – I suspect that won’t help its sales figures, but those who do play will likely find something surprisingly, appealingly unusual.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.