Lost in Random

A kingdom where your number is your fate

Lost in Random is set in the Kingdom of Random, a gothic, storybook-styled land split into six numbered districts collectively called Sixtopia, where every child's entire future is decided at age twelve by the Draw — a rigged lottery ritual controlled by the kingdom's ruler, Queen Constance, that assigns each of them a number and a fate to match it. The story follows Even, a girl whose older sister Odd is taken away by the Draw despite Even's own roll landing on the "impossible" number Thirteen, sending her on a journey across the kingdom's districts to find her, accompanied by Dicey, a sentient talking six-sided die who becomes both her combat tool and her closest companion along the way.

It's an unusually strong premise for the genre, and the hand-painted art direction built around it — repeatedly and specifically compared to Tim Burton's stop-motion films and Studio Laika's output rather than just "spooky-cute" in general — backs it up. Reviewers and players alike treat the visual identity here as a genuine achievement rather than a pleasant backdrop, and it's the clearest reason Lost in Random stands out even among EA's small, curated EA Originals label built specifically to platform distinctive indie ideas like this one.

Dodge in real time, fight with a deck of dice

The combat system is the game's other big swing, and it's a genuinely original hybrid: players dodge enemy attacks in real time, then throw Dicey to trigger a limited hand of dice-encoded special abilities — attacks, defensive tools, utility effects — drawn from a pool the player builds and customises between fights. It's a real fusion of action-game reflexes and deck-building-style resource management, and several reviewers call the underlying idea one of the more inventive combat concepts in recent action-adventure design.

The strain shows over time. There's no default, always-available attack — abilities are powered by Dice Crystals collected from defeated enemies, which means players are frequently interrupting the flow of a fight specifically to farm crystals rather than fighting continuously, a complaint that comes up independently and specifically across a meaningful share of the review corpus. Longer fights lean into dodging and precise aiming in a way more than one reviewer compares to target practice, and the novelty that makes the system's opening hours so interesting is widely reported to flatten out well before the story concludes. The ideas here are genuinely good; the game doesn't fully sustain them.

Camera trouble and the EA Launcher tax

Two more specific, avoidable frustrations show up repeatedly in player feedback. The camera auto-follows the action while also responding to manual right-stick input, and for a meaningful number of players that combination produces near-constant unintended camera motion with no setting to turn the automatic component off — a real accessibility problem for anyone sensitive to that kind of movement, not a matter of taste. Separately, the PC release requires an EA account and the EA App launcher to play, and a specific and vocal slice of negative Steam reviews are explicit that this, not the game itself, is the entire reason for their score — a distinction worth drawing out plainly, since it means the game's real quality is somewhat better than its raw aggregate score alone would suggest to someone skimming past the reviews rather than reading them.

A small studio's biggest swing yet

Zoink is a Swedish studio best known before this for Fe and Flipping Death, both smaller, more tightly scoped games released through the same EA Originals label. Lost in Random is a genuine step up in scale and ambition from that back catalogue — a fully voiced, six-district campaign with a much larger cast and a more structurally ambitious central mechanic than either of the studio's prior efforts attempted. That context matters for judging where the game succeeds and where it strains: the writing, the world design and the art direction all read as a studio operating confidently within its established strengths at a bigger scale, while the combat system reads more like a genuinely new experiment the team hadn't fully stress-tested across a full campaign's length before shipping it. It's the shape of growing pains a small studio's most ambitious release often has, rather than a sign the underlying talent isn't there — EA Originals has generally used the label to let smaller teams take exactly this kind of risk, and here it paid off in the world and the writing more decisively than in the mechanical system built to carry the player through them.

The thematic backbone under all of that is stronger than a typical action-adventure bothers with. The Draw isn't just a plot device to justify Even's journey — it's a fairly direct metaphor for a society that sorts children into rigid, permanent roles before they've had any say in who they want to become, and the game is willing to sit with the unfairness of that system rather than resolve it with a simple, tidy fix. It's a more thoughtful spine than the whimsical, storybook surface might suggest at a glance, and it's part of why the writing holds attention even through the stretches where the combat is contributing less.

Value

At NZ$39.95, Lost in Random is priced reasonably for a story-driven action-adventure of its scope, and the 89%-positive Very Positive score across more than 5,000 reviews holds up well even accounting for the EA Launcher-driven negative reviews pulling some weight downward that isn't really about the game. There's no ongoing monetisation to weigh against the purchase — it's a single, complete story with no add-on content — so the only real value question is whether a genuinely distinctive world and art style, carried by writing and voice work stronger than its combat's staying power, is worth the price of admission. For most of its audience, the aggregate score says yes.