Adventure set in dark fairy tales is the exact opposite of pop open-world games. Such projects are created by madmen for madmen, not according to the rules and even deliberately against the rules, the gameplay is either a minimum, or it is done carelessly, but the plot is fire, and the design of each character is a small work of art. Such things are far from the mainstream, and therefore they are sold poorly and are rarely released. Much less often than I and all lovers of such creativity would like. We have been waiting for the continuation of Alice’s hellish adventures for many years now, and it is not known whether we will ever wait.
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And then, suddenly, the very EA , which does not allow American McGee to do the third part of Alice , releases Lost in Random – a gloomy fairy tale in the style of the work of early Burton. It is even more interesting: the story is based on the crazy fantasies of Ryan North, the author of the comic strip based on the animated series ” Adventure Time “ . Strange, moved, absurd – these words will constantly come to mind during the game, and almost always in a positive sense. If the fight was also good, it would have turned out fabulous. But, unfortunately, storytellers just love to torture heroes before rewarding them with a “they lived happily ever after” ending.
Randomness is above all!
Lost in Random throws us into the world of Randomness. There is everything a good fairy tale needs: a storyteller with the voice of a kind grandfather, magic, monsters and the Black Queen, who offends eccentric inhabitants. Although formally the Queen is not at all in business – “chance rules”. Everything is decided by her Black Cube, which every day determines what the queen will order her subjects: down to who and with what expression on his face to walk the streets. The same cube, like a sinister version of the Harry Potter distribution hat, decides which city each child turns 12 to live in. “Randomness is above all!” – Parents obediently shout when the fate of their children depends on the roll of the dice. “Chance rules!” – and the lucky one will go to the comfortable Sixtopia, rolling like cheese in butter in the most beautiful city of the whole kingdom. “The case decides!
During one of these ceremonies, the main character named Iven lost her older sister, whose name is Odd. She got a six, and in the world of Randomness this is the highest success, and therefore the Black Queen took the girl with her – to live in a beautiful palace, from where, however, no one has returned yet. Piously believing that his sister needs to be saved, Iven decides to follow, violating all the prohibitions, because according to the Queen’s decree, residents cannot leave their city under any circumstances.
The Queen’s propagandist explains to a small crowd that the most important thing is to enjoy any decision of your ruler.
On Even’s thin legs, we have to go around all six cities of Chance – according to the number of sides on the dice. The gameplay is very similar to the RPG from BioWare – Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic , only without pumping and with an emphasis on dialogue. Throughout the story, we will explore small settlements with their own culture and architecture, get acquainted with the local way of life and eccentric inhabitants, run on their orders in open, but eerily linear locations, and solve simple puzzles. From time to time you will have to be distracted from the story in order to beat the crap out of the royal robots, but more on that later.
The salt here, of course, is not in the action. Lost in Random is, first of all, an interactive fairy tale of very specific beauty, and then everything else. The game was modestly advertised, but if you like the dark aesthetics, catching a glimpse of at least one screenshot in the news feed is enough for it to catch on. The picture is delightfully bleak and dull, especially by today’s standards. There is something familiar in the crooked silhouettes of houses, angular artwork and a monochromatic palette. The graphics are like “puppet”. Characters with disproportionately thin limbs and swollen bodies, each have huge, sunken eyes, and hefty bruises shine beneath them. Even in children. And here there is no end of associations. Someone will remember Alice Americana McGee and her land of painful wonders, I vividly resurfaced in my memory “Corpse Bride “ and ” The Nightmare Before Christmas “by Tim Burton. With the latter, there are similarities here even in the soundtrack – the same sad motives, inexplicably combining fabulous magic and melancholy.
However, there is no flirtation with the theme of death in every detail, with maggots and decay, as Burton loves. There is no gore and violence like in Alice. The inhabitants of Chance only look like monsters from terrible dreams, but upon closer acquaintance they turn out to be peace-loving souls.
Architecture in Randomness imitates everyday objects: against the backdrop of giant teapots and maps, you feel tiny. A strange feeling does not leave that somewhere nearby there should be a pie with the inscription “eat me”
At first, it breaks to grumble that, under the guise of a gloomy man, they again slipped a herbivorous cartoon for the whole family. And yes, I am aware that the age rating of the game is 12+, but the “Nightmare Before Christmas” has it about the same, which did not prevent it from being in places … really nightmare. However, it is worth exchanging a couple of words with local bogeymen, as you understand that Lost in Random still has a character. I have probably never met so much inventive absurdity and unpredictable humor anywhere else. Is that in ” Rick and Morty “, but it has its own atmosphere with science fiction and a complete lack of censorship. Lost in Random manages to joke much softer and at the same time no less fun, and sometimes sharp. The Kingdom of Chance is like a crooked reflection of our world: once beautiful sorceresses here turned into body-positive frogs, and vain officials who dream of leaving at least some trace in history squander the treasury for the construction of a second moon, which the population needs no more than a goat accordion.
Rubber fights with rubber swords
The good (and better) half of the game consists of communicating with the characters, excellent dialogues are its hallmark. True, EA for some reason squeezed money for Russian-language localization. The translation was not delivered. Of course, English is easy here, designed for an audience of 12 years old, but that’s the point: the game is for children, but there is no translation! It would not look so ridiculous if EA just scored on the Russian market, but no. Here is the page of the project in Russian on the official website – it introduces the lore, attracts, stimulates sales. This is just a Kafkaesque absurdity: to develop a game with an eye on a children’s audience, upload a gorgeous description of the world in Russian to the Internet, but not even allocate money for the translation of subtitles.
Lost in Random does not try to scare, but occasionally it still becomes in an amicable way uncomfortable
I am sure that sooner or later the craftsmen will make their localization – the game is worthwhile. But what cannot be fixed with amateur patches is the stingy study of locations. Each city in the Kingdom has its own architecture: in Chetyreburg, everything consists of playing cards, in Odincroft, houses in the form of teapots, in Dwatown, houses … Just houses. Everything seems to be chic, stylish and diverse, but inside each city, all these houses and teapots are made as if they were a carbon copy. They merge into solid walls, forming narrow, faceless corridors, similar to each other. Forks and intersections are here at every turn, so you can get lost after the first turn, and even a map will not help. She is cute, similar to a drawing from an old book of fairy tales (the artists obviously tried), but little sense from her. Instead of showing a specific point where Ewen is, only the approximate location is highlighted on the map, i.e. the whole area. Which road you are going, in which direction – the devil only knows, no one knows, neither you nor the map.
The key characters Ewen meets are even crazier than they look. What is only a poetic battle with the mayor-straw scarecrow
But these are small things compared to how annoying duels with robots are. The Lost in Random combat system is a synthesis of classic dodge strikes, random roguelike builds, and playing cards that replace skills, potions, and weapons with inventory. Even does not have a conventional weapon – the girl runs around with a cube, a slingshot and a deck of cards, which she refills as she progresses, as in the CCG. The slingshot does not deal damage and is needed to knock out magic energy from opponents, and having accumulated mana, Ewen can roll a die, which drops a certain number of points – from one to six. Time stops, and then you need to choose from a random set of cards what to fight with the enemy. Cards can carry weapons, several types of bombs and a bunch of all sorts of bells and whistles that affect damage, defense, and so on, and their activation takes the same points,
The first battles with robots resemble some kind of marriage dances, where you walk in circles opposite each other and exchange meaningful glances. All this time, you water enemies with a slingshot (which, recall, does not cause damage) and motherfucker from powerlessness. The fact is that at the beginning of the game you can knock out a maximum of two points on the dice (the other sides are inaccessible), and there are still very few really useful cards in the deck. As a result, some kind of nonsense often comes across: for example, a first-aid kit, when you already have full health, or a card that increases damage to the enemy, when there is simply nothing to do damage. On the other hand, weapons rarely drop out and break quickly.
Lost In Random cannot boast of a variety of enemies. The whole game will have to fight with the same robots
At the same time, the combat system cannot be called bad, although at first it seems well, just awkward. Over time, you quickly grasp what’s what, adjust the deck to fit yourself, throw out all the trash from there and buy working cards. It becomes easier to pick up a weapon for each enemy: a mace against armored tanks, a spear against quick change, a bow against flying tin cans. Bombs and explosive arrows work perfectly in the crowd, scattering the lumberjacks in different directions. Gradually, you can collect an effective build and even enjoy the battles, but after a while it disappears again for an extremely stupid reason: due to the lack of a sense of proportion among the developers. The same robots (six varieties in total) climb out of all cracks in all parts of the city, and the basic principle of fights is starting to remind me of the gameplay of shooters of the 2000s – to drive the player into a small arena and flood opponents in different combinations with waves. The first one feels the drive and excitement. The second one you meet in berserk mode, already hung with weapons and buffs, like Rambo. But then the third wave follows, the fourth, the fifth … And it becomes simply boring.
The most annoying thing is that this problem could be easily avoided. After all, an unusual battle turned out to be generally workable, and opponents of the same type do not matter for the game, in the center of which is an interactive fairy tale. If the number of battles and enemies were reduced by a factor of ten, Lost in Random would only win, and certainly not lose anything. This would allow you to calmly and without annoyance enjoy what the developers really did cool – the atmosphere of a dark wizarding world and conversations with crazy characters.
All the troubles of this world seem to be solved by arena battles
Lost in Random will not break the bank and is unlikely to break into the first line of the charts – this game was created with a different installation. She does not try to please everyone at once and get into the mainstream: it is clear that the authors for once created the characters the way they wanted, and told the story they intended to tell, and did not fulfill the social order. The result is an extravagant tale that scoffs at every possible cliché, old and new. With the action, however, the developers went too far, but personally I had a reason to fight my way through the drawn-out battles – I wanted to listen to the story to the end, it hooked me so much.
It’s only a shame that there is no localization, but oh well. This is a fairy tale where the powerful Black Queen makes delusional decisions with the help of a dice roll, so everything is logical. Congratulations to EA for perfect fit.
Pleased
- the atmosphere of a dark fairy tale;
- fascinating plot;
- dialogues that you can laugh at and think about;
- memorable characters with their own stories;
- original combat system.
Upset
- lack of Russian localization;
- drawn-out and tiring battles;
- a map that is difficult to navigate;
- the same opponents.
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