I have mixed feelings on the concept of ‘luck’. Lost In Random: The Eternal Die heavily features dice, surprisingly. But what you end up with on a die is likely just a combination of the specifics of the die, how you throw it, conditions of the table, etc. But at the same time, when I roll three critical fails in a round of D’n’D, it does rather feel like there’s some giant, otherworldly force that’s unhappy with me. So I don’t believe in it, but still blame it when everything goes wrong. It’s strangely comforting.
Still, despite the name, there isn’t actually that much ‘luck’ in Lost in Random: The Eternal Die. Unless you’re just randomly mashing buttons, I guess. Instead, there’s more emphasis on skill, going by the super tight movement and clever relic system. It’s also set in an interesting world and tries its best to work in some dice here and there. The only problem is that everything feels rather unbalanced, and this threatens to tip the whole game upside-down.
Violent Yahtzee
Lost In Random: The Eternal Die follows Queen Aleksandra, ruler of Random, a place where everyone was living happily until a ‘Black Die’ started vomiting corruption everywhere. Aleksandra goes to sort it out, and promptly gets sucked into the black die and loses her powers. From there, she has to fight her way through the black die’s perversions of her memories to fight the big foe, ‘Mare The Knight’. I should point out that if, like me, you’ve not played the original Lost in Random, then you’ll be missing a lot of context from this storyline. It’s not as stand-alone as it claims.
That’s not a criticism, per se, but it did lead me to scratching my head at times. As you progress, you’ll meet a slew of allies, all of whom talk at you like you’re already supposed to know who they are. Take the giant toad, Aama. She acts like you’ve committed a grave sin against her and her sisters, and a big theme of Lost in Random: The Eternal Die‘s good ending is redemption. But the writing is vague enough that the grave sin could be anything from toad genocide to not refilling the coffee pot. Still, the writing and world are interesting enough that I did find myself engaged, if not as emotionally gripped as it was hoping for.
Anyhow, let’s move onto gameplay. The Eternal Die is an action roguelite, where you progress through floors and bosses, and carry home upgrade materials upon death. First things first, the movement and basic combat are stellar. The dash button seems wired to my brain, not my controller. The four basic weapons have weight to them, and the enemy AI seems reasonably smart. The in-run upgrades are clever too. Upgrades need to be slotted into a grid, and are all colour coded. Match three colours, and it raises a stat like weapon damage. You only have a limited grid, so you quickly need to choose between keeping an ability buff (like poisoning on a critical hit), or replacing it to keep your stats high enough. Good stuff.
Snake Eyes
Roguelites live and die on their gameplay balance. Too easy and it defeats the point, too hard and it’s just frustrating. The Eternal Die is bewilderingly easy. There’s a few reasons for that. Most foes are slow-moving melee attackers, so the bow renders them impotent. Relics drop very frequently, so its fairly trivial to beef yourself up early on. There is also no limit on how many permanent ‘blessings’ you can take, including one that gives you up to three revives, snapping what difficulty is left over its knee. In the end, if you can survive the first boss fight, then you’re guaranteed of an almost straight shot to the final boss.
This imbalance has a number of serious knock-on effects. For one, I reached the first set of credits in five hours. Secondly, it highlights the distinct lack of variation between runs. You’ll face the same bosses in the same biomes each time, and without a distinct challenge, it becomes quite repetitive. To unlock the good ending, you need to fulfil ally quests, and a good chunk of them require grabbing collectibles like outfits or little dice fellas. So as I was breezing through the game, my runs started to blur together, putting me into a trance. My pride at beating Mare the Knight began to dribble away when I realised it was pretty much an inevitability.
It’s frustrating because the solution to this repetitive feeling is quite literally staring you in the face: the dice. You have a little die following you, named Fortune, who you can throw in battle. Their damage depends on the number it lands on. That, and a few dice-related mini-games, is the extent of the randomness. For a game with random in its title, it’s remarkably linear. Using dice to roll for blessings and weapons at the start of a run would add some appealing random spice to the mix, and make the most of the core concept. It would stop me spurning all weapons but the bow and explosive arrows, at least.
Lost In Random: The Eternal Die – Charming But Wobbly
Still, while The Eternal Die wobbles a bit with its gameplay, the presentation is undeniably charming. The art style is very deliberately inspired by Tim Burton, and all the characters have wonderful designs and feel distinct. The world, too, is an interesting one. Random seems controlled by dice, and has a fascination with games. So the world inside the black die is littered with random dice and cards. It’s a nice aesthetic, being both happy and slightly creepy; something shared with the character design.
In the end, Lost in Random: The Eternal Die is proof that one key flaw can start to degrade everything around it. I was quite enjoying myself until I realised just how unbalanced things were. I ended up breezing through subsequent runs without even really trying, meaning the good end came with a simple investment of time, rather than effort. The bulk of The Eternal Die is undeniably charming and the core gameplay is very smooth, but it needs to have a good, hard think about its balance.
