Lost in Random is a third-person action game inspired by a series of children's storybooks but takes a more mature approach with unusual character design that speaks in rhyme and riddles and a darker theme to do with your social position and living status determined by the age of 12 where people have to do ceremony by rolling a six-sided dice. The higher the result, the better condition the city will be compared to ones lower than it (with 6 in total), or so that it seems. No matter the outcome of the dice roll, the person will be forced to move or stay put in a city that represents the number on the dice roll.

We play as Even and her little dice buddy called Dicey. Together, they are on a mission to rescue Odd (Even sister) who was kidnapped by the Queen to be brainwashed to be the heir next to the throne to continue the corruption of rigging dice results for their benefit and sustaining the pyramid system intact.

Outside of combat, we will be interacting with other characters, doing quests, and solving puzzles where we can be rewarded with cards for deckbuilding as prep for fighting enemies. In total, there are 34 unique cards for you to discover and be rewarded with but you could probably find them all by the fourth level if you look hard enough and do most of the sidequests. The deck you will be building can only have up to 15 cards and only 2 duplicates giving you many options to make each one you make focus on different strategies, like crowd control with different traps, status effects like freezing and poisoning fouls, or cost management by having cards that could increase the point of the dice number so you can use them to spend on being able to play higher cost cards with a bigger effect on the playing field.

While in combat before we can use the unmatchable power of our little dice buddy, Even needs to collect crystal shards scattered across a battlefield or one attached to the enemies by taking them off with her slingshot shoot or by attacking them or either by dodging their attacks with the right time. Once enough shards are collected, Even will be able to throw Dicey to roll a number, freezing time in the process and giving you as long time as you need to reposition yourself and plan your next move. When time is frozen, you will be drawing five cards from your deck, spending the petal dot of the draw roll to play those cards that activate the different abilities they represent. For example, equipping Even with a sword with limited durability per melee hit, or bomb trap you place anywhere and activate them if you wish. Once you're done, you can unfreeze by manually pressing a button or hitting the enemy to continue the battle. You could say this is a sidescroller version of Transistor if you're familiar with that game.

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• Level 1:
  A slow but great tutorial and introduction to the world we will be exploring.
  
• Level 2:
  This is where I started to see how wacky this game can be. First thing, by being over-the-top with the character design, like a tall, slender man, a sneaky, untrustworthy wolf, or a person whose facial features are all over the place. I also love how ridiculous the town takes the number 2 into every literal consideration.
  
• Level 3:
  The whole juxtaposition of pity triplets being at war fighting each other in giant armour statues while you are down below running for your life between war tunnels to do quests of each of them to rekindle their relationship while you have to worry about a shadowy figure trying to kidnap you is such as fun concern. My favourite section out of the whole game.
  
• Level 4:
  The theme here is supposed to be gambling casinos, but it misses the mark. The quest design in this section is similar to the one from the second level (and later level 5), where you're just doing the same type of quest you've done before. The aesthetic is cool but that's about it. I was hoping there would be some high-risk and luck quests involving dice rolling where you can be rewarded with rare cards that are hard to get which would have made this level more memorable if something like that was the case. This is about the start when I felt this game was about to get stale.
  
• Level 5:
  For plot reasons, I can understand why this level isn't as exciting as the rest but more could have been done to make it stand out and look like Level 1 and 2 but with more steampunk gadgets.
  
• Level 6:
  For the amount of build-up we got of Even internal conflict of her self-doubt to do with saving her sister, the final configuration with the Queen payoff felt lacking. The boss fight was far too easy. It didn't help we didn't get more dialogue exchange between Even and the Queen. I would much rather have the Granny be the main antagonist instead; at least with her, we have more reason to hate her as we gain more interaction with her.

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This game is an answer to my request for a game that involves dice rolling, so it is already a win in my book. For the concept part, it works well, very creative indeed, along with the character design and worldbuilding whereby keeping intact fairy tale and fantasy steampunk marinate well together. There are also a fair amount of neat ideas like board battle arenas with different win conditions and side quests with varying card rewards based on your outcome, and we can't forget about the best trader to ever grace us in this game, Mannie Dex (you'll see the way). I must credit Katey Parr for doing a splendid job showcasing Even determination and fieriness in her quest to save her sister. I would argue it is in the same realm as Amicia VA from Plague Tale Innocence. Lastly, I'm obsessed with the appearance of the handcrafted character model. They look so good I want to own some.

Some of you may be wondering why I'm not recommending this game. Well for as long as this game is, the combat did start to get less interesting due to the combat's lack of enemy varieties and not enough cards to find. As I mentioned before, I collected all the cards by Level 4, so there was no reason for me to explore anymore and do any more sidequests but, I still did anyway, hoping to be proven wrong but, nothing new came about to allow me to keep experimenting. I felt like more cards should be added, rarer ones that are hard to find to reward players for trying to find them to make the combat more interesting. Stronger cards that could cost over 3 dice petal points could be added for once.

It didn't help that the levels after the halfway point were less exciting, dragging the experience down from what I felt was a good first half. It seems like the developer ran out of doing anything new to keep the player engaged with the story. I feel shouldn't have been as long as it was to keep up with the theme of each city representing a dice petal number if the final climax wouldn't be worth it, in my opinion. I still love what this game has accomplished. Nonetheless, I wish the developer equalise their creativity to all levels throughout the development.

Interesting art style and character design and I really like the idea of the random card choices during combat, but everything else about the game is a slog. No real exploration (you can only jump at pre-determined points where it prompts you to press a button to jump) with walls everywhere, combat is very, very basic, story is not anything really unique, and there are cutscenes (or rather walkthrough/runthrough scenes) everywhere.

Also, a more minor gripe, but the Origins requirement is really crappy.

Try it on sale, but I wasn't hooked at all.

Amazing!