Between battles, you will have chance to purchase new cards and manage your deck. Once action recommences, you’re back to attacking – with any boons from your cards – and into another loop. The cards grant abilities or modifiers of various kinds, which must be used strategically to defeat your foes. At this point, your enemies all freeze, allowing you to choose your cards and line up your next attack. When you have a hand of five cards, Even can roll Dicey to determine how many points can be spent, each card costing the number shown on its face. As crystals are collected, cards are turned over from the deck into your hand. First, Even must aim her slingshot at enemies’ weak points to dislodge crystals, which Dicey then collects. The voice acting is sometimes hammy but always fun – although it seems lip-sync was not even attempted, unfortunately.īut the battles are where Lost in Random really tries something different, combining real-time action, dice rolls and deck building – and sometimes board games – into one seamless loop. The materials of the environment are felt through the texture of their sounds, while the dramatic orchestral soundtrack rings timpani and bells for enigma and gravity, with Tom and Jerry-style punctuation on the action in cutscenes further varnishing the production. It sounds gorgeous, too, with delicious sound design breathing back in any of the life that the Switch’s visuals might have let escape. On the big screen, though, it looks gorgeous. Handheld players beware, however: there’s a real downgrade once the Switch leaves its dock. Pop-in and frame drops are infrequent and cause no real bother. It’s only if you put different versions side-by-side that Switch players will feel left out. While the Switch may lack the very specialest effects of its contemporaries, the game still looks fantastic and never feels like a compromise. It’s these naturalistic finishes that make Lost in Random pop with magical verisimilitude on more powerful hardware. We see wood, leather, fabric, clay and bone-like substances. The aesthetic resembles stop-motion animation in its use of naturalistic and craft-like materials. The story is Alice in Wonderland meets The Dice Man, so there was plenty of room to get dark with it, but developer Zoink went more gently family-friendly. It’s straight-up fairytale, not subversive. The obvious reference point here is the work of Tim Burton, but by comparison, Lost in Random is not in any way sinister. We’ll come back to those, but the graphics, sound and story are for the most part able to do the heavy lifting that is asked of them. It’s in the battles, though, that gameplay is distinctive. The walking around and chatting to NPCs for quests is all very familiar stuff, relying on the artwork, sound design and writing to lift it all above rote busywork. This structure is not in any way revolutionary but serves well as a framework to drape the game over. In the course of traversing the towns to find and complete these quests, you encounter battles. The gateways between realms can be opened only when you have enough pips on your dice, and those are acquired by completing quests in the world as you explore. Even starts off in Onecroft and set off to find Odd in Sixtopia, passing in turn through Two-Town, Threedom, etc. The world is structured in six realms - linked to the faces of the dice - from Onecroft, the lowliest of the low, to Sixtopia, representing a fantasy life of luxury with the Queen. When Odd is whisked away, Even sets off to find her, befriending as she goes a magical dice named. They’re separated by the Queen in accordance with a draconian tradition that sees children roll a dice on their twelfth birthday to determine their station for the rest of their life. Lost in Random tells a story of two sisters, Even and Odd, who inhabit a fantastical storybook world of woollen chess pieces and steampunk teapots and the like. Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)
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