What do you get when you throw a whimsical world, a collection of dice puns and a top-down roguelike together? Well, Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, a pseudo-sequel to Lost in Random. The top-down roguelike has fast-paced combat, a lovely art style, and it still feels like it’s a part of ‘Random’.
While it totally changes the genre, it does a very good job in a competitive scene.
Down The Rabbit Hole
If you didn’t play Lost in Random back in 2021, it was a third-person action adventure game set in the whimsical town of Random. The art style was wonderfully Tim Burton-esque, and the whole thing had an Alice in Wonderland “we’re all mad here” vibe to it. The big bad of that game was Queen Aleksandra, and in this sequel, you play as her, dethroned and looking to regain her title.
The genre change to a top-down action roguelike, coupled with the fact that you’re playing as the villain from the last game, feels like a bit of a sudden shift. But the game is very well built and holds its own amongst strong competition in the genre.
You start each run in a slightly different way, with various weapons to choose from, and a random spell. You’ll fight through a map made up of random rooms featuring enemies, shops, puzzles, or minigames. Eventually you’ll hit a boss room, and if you can defeat it, you’ll move on to the next biome.
You’re joined on your adventure by Fortune — a cute little dice character you can throw for extra damage, depending on what you roll.
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Outside of each run, you return to a little town with colourful NPCs who are all a bit mad and share snippets of story every few runs. Carrying the thread of Lost in Random, they’re all previous denizens of Queen Aleksandra’s court, some of whom recognise her as the deposed monarch.
In town you can buy upgrades, unlock new weapons and outfits, and hear the stories of the people of Random. It has those same little moments of excitement that Hades does; each time you come back to town and something has changed, or a character has a little exclamation point above their head.
Knives Out, Dice On The Table
The combat is very tidy, with hits that are fast when they need to be and heavy when you want them to be — exactly what you want in this genre. The enemy silhouettes are excellent and make it easy to read their attacks, even when there’s a lot happening on screen. Combat is easily the standout in Lost in Random: The Eternal Die.
It’s very easy to slip into a flow state when you know all of your abilities and have learned the attack patterns of the enemy in front of you. You’ll dodge attacks, fire off spells, and avoid traps to stay alive, almost on autopilot — in the best way.
That’s the loop here — you enter a random room, assess the challenge in front of you, solve it, and move on. Puzzle rooms, shops, and little minigames break you out of the loop, but they’re fun little distractions that use the dice roll mechanic well. One such room had you rolling Fortune on a miniature game board to win prizes.
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Occasionally, you’ll find trap rooms where you need to leap and dodge fireballs, spikes, and pits, as well as combat rooms that shake up the mould. One had enemy-spawning portals that needed to be destroyed to stop the flood of baddies, and another had the map slowly falling away into acid.
During my time with the game, each run felt very different and unique. I had one great run where I collected modifiers that caused downed enemies to spawn poison. And another modifier where poison caused enemies to fire darts that spread the poison. So in a crowd, it would propagate on and on as more enemies got poisoned. In a different run, I focused on stunning attacks as well as frost to slow down enemies. These little tweaks make every run feel unique.
When The Chips Are Down
There are a lot of systems in Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, and while they do overlap and create some nice synergies, they can also start to feel like bloat.
For example, at the start of a run, you choose one of four weapons. Then, you get a random spell attack, which has a basic and a perfect-timed version. You have your dice throw that does damage depending on the number rolled. And THEN you also collect items to go into a match-3 inventory mechanic, which can change your spell attack, your dice roll, or give passive abilities.
If that wasn’t enough, back at the home base, you can upgrade each weapon with four trees of alternate attacks, skills and options. You also have passive personal upgrades. Even the two shopkeepers who sell weapons and personal upgrades, each have their own currency that isn’t used anywhere else. It’s a lot!
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At times, it feels like systems on top of systems, and while each one is good in its own right, I found it too hard to keep track of more than one or two per run. For example, when focusing on weapon attacks and spells, I barely ever used the dice throw. Or I might spec into dice throws and leave the spells. For anyone who loves an extra layer, you might like the variance this brings to each run. But for me, it just felt like a house of cards, begging to fall over.
Lost in Random: The Eternal Die tries something different from its predecessor, and that’s going to be a gamble, whichever way you cut the cards. For fans of roguelikes, there’s a lot to chew on here with a bunch of different systems to play with. For me personally, I would have liked one or two fewer for a bit more focus.
I enjoyed diving back into the world of Random, and found plenty to like from the sequels change in perspective.
Quest Daily Scores Lost in Random: The Eternal Die:
8/10
Lost in Random: The Eternal Die is coming to PC via Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch on June 18th.
Access to Lost in Random: The Eternal Die was provided by the publisher.
