Imagine this: You find yourself stranded in a desert island, and your plane is totaled. So what do you do? Do you venture through the dangers of the jungle? Or do you stay to see if someone can rescue you? This is the premise of Lost Sea, a top down action survival game, or as I like to refer to The Lost Sea, a link to the Islands.
You will start off with picking one of a few characters with the standard mix of male and female. Though cosmetic differences aside, they all play the same. After picking a character you like ,you will be sent to the island where you will learn a little about where you are and how to play.
Playing the game is simple. With your trusty and not so rusty machete, you fight monsters to get experience points, find money, and then find tablets to advance to new islands, all the while hunting down some treasure along the way. Each island is procedurally generated. Although some look the same, monster placement and items found differ from each other, so no two islands are the same. As expected when you start your adventure, you will have no skills or upgrades, but by killing monsters and gaining coins by breaking barrels, you will be able to buy upgrades. One of the first skills you can get is the sprint skill, and this does come in handy beyond the combat applications as the characters walk slow normally. You also have a ship, which you can upgrade so that it will help you track down loot and travel between islands.
Another element of the game is in finding crew members to join you. At first, you can only have one crew member with you, but as you progress, you can upgrade it so you can have up to four with you at a time. The crew members all have skills they can use such as lock-picking to open chests, increasing the amount experience you get for killing monsters, or mining to dig up items or even a one time use revive to help when you get killed. So there is a lot of variety, and some crew members are more useful than others (some have four skills at a time like, lockpick, experience gain, mining, etc.). However, their usefulness is only as a buff, since they do not help you fight monsters. They cower in terror, and their AI is not the brightest bulb in the package. I found more than once I had to go back to track one down because he got stuck on a tree or a ledge (and later I didn’t care to backtrack unless it was one that increased my experience gain).
Besides crew members, you will also find items like a pistol, med-kits, or my favorite, the bomb, which kills everything in sight. Once you get an item, you have to use it as there is no way to throw it away, Also, items are one use only, so you have to think when it’s the best time to use it. While it can be and oversight (especially to item hoarders like me), it makes sense you are in a desert island, so of course your resources are limited. At first, you can only use one item at a time (you can use the items real time with the directional buttons), but you can increase the amount of slots up to four via upgrades. There are also items with negative effects, such as the adrenaline shot, which makes you move faster, but once it runs out you are left only with one HP.
To advance to a new island, you must find tablets on a level. Each level is rated from easy to hard, where easy will have fewer monsters and have three tablets to find and hard will have more monsters and only one tablet. A tablet will have a number on it letting you advance to a new island. This plays out a little like a board game where the number of the tablet would be the result of a dice roll, and you can move that many islands. Another thing that I really like about Lost Sea is that even if you die (permadeath), you can still restart with a different character, but with improved abilities and second chances. What strikes he most for me was that I felt that I was playing a Legend of Zelda game: the exploration, the puzzles, and the top down action (not to mention the Master Machete). I just needed the item to get fanfare, and I was done.
Graphically, I like the cel-shade. It goes so well with the game, bringing out the colorful environments you traverse through. The challenge is there as well, even more in later levels where you are surrounded by many strong enemies.
Bottom Line: Lost Sea is a good entry level roguelite with fun gameplay mechanics, colorful graphics, and chill music is a fun adventure to lose yourself for a while. It’s not perfect, and I mean this in the AI for the crew member. However, thinking about it, not everyone can stand in the face of danger and valiantly fight against all odds with a machete. I give Lost Sea a solid commendation. If you want something different, give it a change. You won’t regret it.