Review | Lost In Random: The Eternal Die – Roguelike Rules
It’s always a delight when a game you enjoyed that you feel not many others played gets a sequel or follow-up. Case in point: 2021’s Lost in Random by Swedish studio Zoink, which was published by EA as part of its EA Originals label for indie games. I was almost immediately enamoured with its stop motion-esque visuals, dark fairytale atmosphere, and a world and gameplay systems themed around the very concept of games and randomness.
I know I wasn’t alone since the game got solid reviews, but I can’t find any mention of sales figures, and between Zoink merging with multiple studios to form Thunderful Entertainment and EA simply being EA, I would never have figured a Lost in Random sequel would see the light of day.
So, imagine my surprise when Lost in Random: The Eternal Die was announced last year, with Thunderful self-publishing and one of its studios, Stormteller Games, on development duties. However, I must confess my excitement was diluted a tiny bit when I realised this sequel was shifting genres and jumping on the roguelike bandwagon — a genre I have almost zero interest in. I’ve never cared for the idea of playing a game and losing any progress made after failing once. Thanks to The Eternal Die, though, while I may not have become a roguelike convert, I have a better understanding and appreciation for the genre.
This game loves its chess theming.
If you’ve played any roguelike before, such as Hades or Enter the Gungeon, then The Eternal Die’s premise will feel very familiar. You make your way through randomly generated floors, fighting enemies and strengthening your character with any upgrades you find, with the goal being to clear all the floors in a single run. Die at any point and you’re forced back to the very start, losing all your upgrades.
For first-time roguelike players, the very idea of having to start from scratch every time sounds horribly demoralising, but The Eternal Die quickly makes it apparent that failure is not the end. You do lose upgrades and buffs, but you retain two resources — cinder and pip dust — that you pick up during runs that can be spent on weapons and blessings respectively.
There are four different weapons to choose from (all of which are very simple to use) and while I expected to stick with the basic sword for its well-roundedness, forcing myself to experiment made me realise that they’re all viable. My first victory against the final boss was with the slow swinging hammer, which surprised me since it was the one weapon I figured I’d hate using.
Each weapon also comes with four unique enhancements that provide passive effects which can be upgraded, like increasing critical hit rate or inflicting burn on enemies. You can only pick one per run, but it’s worth testing them all to see which ones you vibe with the most.
As for the blessings, which can be acquired from an NPC who resides in the home base you return to between runs, these passive buffs can be genuine game changers. They start out simple and cheap enough, like increasing your max health or attack damage, but the more expensive ones will feel like godsends for when you’re struggling with more challenging encounters, such as one that instantly revives you upon death.
It will take you a while to amass enough cinder and pip dust for these upgrades, but you’re not entirely helpless from the get-go. Aside from your weapon of choice, you have two other means of damaging enemies. The first is your dice companion, who can be thrown to deal damage within a certain radius, with the strength of the attack depending on what number you roll.
It’s a far snappier attack than it sounds, and is great for when you want to keep your distance — I never once missed where I was aiming (I think there’s some slight lock-on as well to help ensure you hit your target). The one downside is that you need to go pick the dice back up yourself, but there are blessings to help with that.
Dice rolls are also used for the random minigames you’ll encounter.
Secondly, in every run you’re gifted one of 15 cards that can be used as a special attack, provided you have enough energy in your energy gauge, which can be refilled by collecting shards from defeated enemies. Each card has a unique effect, from unleashing a cry that stuns enemies to summoning an icy whirlwind around you. If you hold down the button and release it with the right timing, you can also deal extra damage and trigger additional effects, which is fairly easy to accomplish even during a particularly hectic encounter.
Then, of course, there are the relics, which you can randomly earn from chests that can appear after clearing a combat encounter or purchase from the shop that appears once per floor with any gold coins you acquire. A chest contains three relics to choose from, all of which offer a unique effect such as increasing attack damage when above 50% health or summoning icicles when throwing your dice. There are a whopping 128 potential relics (many of which I’ve still not used yet) and it’s a lot of fun coming up with different combinations each run and building your strategy around them.
What helps make The Eternal Die’s temporary passive boons distinct from other roguelikes is the manner in how you equip them. You have a grid with 13 slots to fill, which is quite a lot, but precisely where you place your relics is important. Each relic has a colour — red, yellow, blue, purple, or green — and by matching three or more of the same colour in a row, the colours are removed and exchanged for a stat boost (like increased weapon damage for red, increased card damage for yellow, etc.) that you keep for the remainder of the run.
This invites a surprising but welcome level of strategy for equipping relics, and it can lead to some hard choices the more you have. Rather than swapping weaker relics for stronger ones, you might want to exchange one just so you can get a matching colour bonus. You can also find pearls that do nothing on their own but can be used for match bonuses and will be removed from the grid once spent as well as dyes to colour your relics (the colours even stack so you can have more than one on any given relic).
Equipping relics is a puzzle in and of itself.
None of the above matters, though, if you don’t have the skills to make it through enemy encounters. The Eternal Die’s combat is far from complex, but it is by no means easy. This will sound obvious to anyone experienced with the genre, but roguelikes are all about memorisation and learning from failure. Fortunately, The Eternal Die’s small enemy pool makes it easy to memorise attack patterns and each floor has its own set of enemy types, so you’ll always know what to expect on subsequent runs. Plus, enemies will flash right when they’re about to attack, informing you of when you need to dodge (said dodge is great since it provides brief invincibility). As a result, combat never feels unfair and every death I experienced was a result of me not paying attention or mistiming a dodge in a moment of bad luck.
Even if I wasn’t trying to beat the game ahead of an embargo, every failed run left me thinking “Oh, one more though,” and I found myself getting further and further with each run. Part of that was thanks to my steady accruement of blessings and weapon upgrades, but it was also because I was just getting better at the game. Each boss fight felt like an insurmountable wall on my first encounter, but I wound up overcoming them regardless. All in all, it’s immensely satisfying to either walk out of combat unscathed or by the skin of your teeth, since no matter how much health you have, the right amount of skill (and a bit of luck) means you have some chance of making it through the next fight. I get the sense you could theoretically clear a run entirely unscathed and/or without any sort of buffs if you’re skilled enough (though I’m far too cowardly to try).
I do wonder, though, if The Eternal Die will at all attract those who enjoy roguelikes but never played the original Lost in Random, since it doesn’t really add anything new to the genre or do anything too radically different from its peers. If I was feeling particularly cynical, I’d accuse it of only being a roguelike because of the genre’s prominence, but it’s clear Stormteller Games knows fans of Lost in Random who yearned for a sequel may not be too thrilled seeing the story’s next chapter told in a drastically different way from the first game.
The Eternal Die isn’t as much of a time sink as other roguelikes since you only ever need to clear all four floors and beat the final boss once to clear the game, and while you’re encouraged to complete a small list of side quests to achieve the best ending, you’ll easily do so if you’re making a point to check every room during your runs. Finding all the missing dicelings can be a little tricky since they can easily blend in with the environment, but the game seems to know this since walking near a diceling causes a blue circle to light up surrounding it. There’s also an easy mode option should you find yourself really struggling and just want to see how the story ends.
Boss fights will feel mean on your first go but they all have patterns.
Clearing the game does unlock the option to do a run with a Sigil of Misfortune, which bumps up the difficulty of enemy encounters and forces you to take on random handicaps with each floor, like less potent healing elixirs or getting poisoned by enemy attacks. There are four levels of difficulty though there doesn’t seem to be much reward for clearing them outside of additional cosmetics. By that point, you keep playing more for the love of the game (though I should stress, I’ve only managed to clear the first level of Sigil of Misfortune so there could be other neat unlockables).
For fans of Lost in Random, the real draw comes from The Eternal Die’s premise. Rather than continuing the story of the first game’s protagonist, Even, you instead play as its villain, Queen Aleksandra, who was last seen turning on her dark lord masters. Though it turns out she won that fight, she didn’t fare as well against the Black Die, the unholy relic she herself once wielded, and was dragged inside of it (losing her once tall, imposing stature as she’s reverted to a child’s body) to be at the mercy of the evil spirit within, Mare the Knight (if you groaned at that name, Lost in Random’s style of writing and humour may not be for you).
The plot of The Eternal Die isn’t inaccessible to newcomers thanks to how minimalist it is, and the worldbuilding is simple enough to get your head round, but I sense Aleks’ journey won’t be as interesting to anyone who isn’t very familiar with her actions in the first game. She may be the protagonist this time and on the side of good, but Aleks was an unequivocal tyrant. Even’s journey through the land of Random in the last game showed how messed up things were because of the queen, who was found to essentially be kidnapping kids and using them as sacrifices to keep her dying sister alive, something her sister was unsurprisingly not okay with that led to her own sacrifice, prompting Aleks’ decision to turn on the Black Die.
Aleks’ journey is initially one of pure revenge, but with each run, you meet inhabitants of the Black Die, some of whom Aleks trapped there herself. While some serve as the boss encounters, others agree to help her out, though not without some distrust on both sides. Easily the most messed up example is a middle-aged man who Aleks banished to the Black Die when he was a child and thus never grew up mentally, and occasionally you can see figures in the background ensnared in twisted black vines, having been trapped there for who knows how long and presumably lifeless. Gradually, Aleks comes to sincerely regret her actions and begin seeking personal atonement, even as Mare routinely throws her past back in her face.
Playing as the reformed villain always makes for a fascinating experience though a part of me wishes she began the game a lot nastier to the people around her before gradually softening up. Even so, she makes for a great straight woman to the odder inhabitants she befriends and while she may no longer strike an intimidating figure, the barbs she throws at her enemies shows she’s still the same, if less tyrannical, queen at heart. Amusingly, it’s her moments of droll sarcasm that humanise her more than her moments of empathy.
Rack here slowly wins over Aleks with his weapon upgrades and bad jokes.
While I don’t think The Eternal Die makes for a great starting point for the world of Lost in Random, it’s a more than worthy successor to the first game and a great introduction to roguelikes as a whole. I probably would have preferred a sequel be closer in style to the first game and expand further on the worldbuilding (The Eternal Die’s four floors are ultimately only aesthetically distinct from each other), but I quickly came round to what The Eternal Die offers from a gameplay standpoint and the writing is very much on par with what came before.
I admittedly don’t think I’m any more compelled to try out other roguelikes but should another familiar franchise I happen to love announce it’s giving the genre a go, I’ll definitely be more open minded to it.
