Lost in Random is a game all about chance. In the adventure title, you explore six different worlds, doing battle with the monsters within them, all aided by a friendly die named Dicey. Rolling Dicey grants you a powerup, but just like everything else in the game, this powerup is random. The more you play, the more you get to influence the odds, but it's still all down to luck. Lead writer and director Olov Redmalm explains he feels all games have these elements of chance to them, but by bringing them to the forefront, Lost in Random gets to explore them in more depth.
"Because it's about the dice and randomness, you can focus on it," Redmalm says. "I remember discussions like, 'Is this going to be too much or too little?' But then we realised all games have randomness in them, they just don't show it that much. Even a game based on tabletop role-playing games like Baldur's Gate doesn't show the dice except in the new one. I always enjoyed that as a kid – 'Oh, everything went to hell, but I loved that, let's try again'. It was fun to fail. And I think that's something we tried to push in the fights, to not be afraid of the risk and reward. There's a chance you fail, but you get up again and keep going."
Redmalm mentions Baldur's Gate, but Lost in Random's aesthetic is more based on traditional board games. Zoink CEO Klaus Lyngeled explains how they capture this essence, noting that board games, ultimately, do not matter in the grand scheme of things. When you're playing them though, they become the most important thing in the world – this is the idea the game taps into.
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"Obviously, it's a single player experience, while board games are really about having people around the board and playing together," Lyngeled says. "We talked about what's cool about board games is the idea that it's my turn to roll the dice now. And then when I roll the dice, I get to make some decisions, and everybody else has to wait. [Lost in Random] has that same feel of fight, fight, fight until you finally get to throw the dice. And then when you throw the dice, you get to choose and be smart. That's where the inspiration of that feeling similar to board games comes from, because you start to think a lot about what is cool about rolling dice?"
While Lost in Random feels like an incredibly original game, bursting with inventiveness, it wears its inspirations on its sleeve too. Not only is it openly inspired by Tim Burton's art style, board games, and Baldur's Gate – when I ask about potential inspirations taken from Alice: Madness Returns and MediEvil, the devs are keen to add extra inspirations onto the list as well.
"I think because I'm old I just like to make games that are like old games," Redmalm says. "I didn't have a good enough computer when I was a kid to play Psychonauts, and I remember I watched my brother play Alice and it was a little bit too scary for me at that time. I think Klaus is more for those kinds of adventure games. I played a lot of Western RPGs mostly, but I really love this action-adventure genre where there's more room to do something weird and try out something new. It has less preconceptions. It's more open to new things than if, say, you're making a CRPG, it comes with a lot of associations and expectations. I just listened to the guys who played all these classic adventure games, and I bring in my own inspirations like playing Baldur's Gate and pausing the game, but [still being] actively in the world, since the character is the one throwing the dice in front of your face and freezing time themselves. It's not just something you, as an omnipresent player, is doing. It's Even who is doing it together with Dicey. You're mostly guiding them."
Lyngeled had his own inspirations to throw on the pile too. "For me, it's really going back to games like MDK, for example," he says. "It's this old game I really like where you're allowed to do quite quirky stuff, but there was also a game mechanic that was very, very connected to the gameplay and to the world itself. It's merged into everything – into story, characters, and how the mechanic is working in the world itself. I really like those kinds of games where it's packaged together in one nice thing. I'm very happy with the direction we went. We deliberately took out jumping in the game, for example, because I knew as soon as you put jumping in there, people start thinking about platforming, and 3D platforming, and that's too many things to handle."
One of the key characters in the game is Dicey, who accompanies Even on her adventure. Not only is Dicey the one physically rolled to get the different outcomes in combat, he's also a character in his own right, and Redmalm, who ended up voicing the character, knows him better than most. "It was a placeholder voice to begin with," he admits. "For the very first demo, we needed some kind of noise, and I just jumped in and did some gurgling and breathing, constraining my throat and breathing inwards, shouting. And we ended up cutting that up into tiny bits. We have a dialogue system that randomises the gibberish sound, so you always get a bit of a new kind of sound, but we also have different moods in the dialogue – he can be sad, happy, angry or scared. And that changes the voice.
"There's this feeling of almost meeting an animal and feeling like I have a strong connection with it and getting closer as you know it better. And you can swear that it has its own personality and soul if you will. There's something special about connecting with something that's different to you. [We took] a lot of inspiration from The Iron Giant, the same way that even though it's a huge character, it has the same kind of innocence. It's very powerful without knowing about it."
Lyngeled explains why the team went in this direction, instead of writing specific lines. "We want him to feel like he is some kind of alien force in a way that you don't really understand," he says. "That Dicey comes from outside and it feels like something that you're not used to. But we also still wanted to be cute, so that's why he talks like that. It's similar to tricks you do with R2-D2 and Chewbacca – think if you had put a real voice in the character, you would probably lose something. This way, people put their own emotions into how Dicey reacts. They form their own ideas about it, which is better than actually just knowing."
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