Review: Lost Sea

Lost Sea, by Eastasiasoft, has a simple premise: lost in the Bermuda Triangle, you need to find your way home. Gameplay is just as simple, providing a quaint little title to lose yourself in for short periods of time.

After selecting a hero character, you find yourself alone in a top-down view, moving your character with the left stick and spinning around the map with the right. Your goal is to progress through each system – all with a different theme: jungle, desert, swamp and snow – hopping from island to island in an effort to get a mysterious portal that leads home. Procedurally generated, each island comes with a hub area that allows for upgrades and to progress to the next. To do that, you’ll need to explore and find a map tablet that lets you travel on.

Armed with a machete, you can take swings at boxes, bushes, breakable wooden walls and various enemies, causing them to drop health, coins and mysterious green goop of some sort. Those latter currencies are used to upgrade both yourself and your ship, making it easier to find allies, tablets and hidden treasure.

While it’s possible to complete the game without an ally, they’re quite useful. Some are lockpickers, able to open chests and offer up extra weaponry or skills. Others still are miners, able to dig up the same. Another subset can build bridges to get to extra secrets otherwise unreachable. Finally, some come with a revive skill, able to bring you back to life should you become overpowered. Best yet, once you find a map tablet, you can burden your ally with it, freeing your arms up to tackle enemies on the way back to the island’s hub. For the most part, you can trust them to get the job done, though there are times when your ally will just get stuck in the world, too stupid to figure out to go around a wall or a rock.

Each island system features a boss battle to close it up; they’re relatively easy, but nice enough in that they break up regular gameplay. Over-the-top animations of most of the bosses tells me that eastasiasoft has perhaps a younger demographic in mind than this reviewer can attest to being in.

That’s pretty much it; you move from island to island, checking your map to see where a tablet is, making your way to it, collecting it and moving on. Rinse, repeat. It’s a simple gameplay loop, sure, but one that’s fun – for a set period of time. The problem with Lost Sea is that it’s a mobile game trying to be a console game; you’re not going to feel compelled to play for long periods of time.

The problem there is that the game is unforgiving if you’re of that mentality; it wants you to play its entire thing from start to finish in one go. You won’t have any of your progress saved for next time if you’re in the middle of an island system. Quitting and coming back later means you’re going to have to start from the first island of whichever system you quit on. Without any of the upgrades that you bought for yourself or for your ship along the way, either. It’s nonsensical and a tad frustrating, especially once you’re used to a run ability that makes things a lot more enjoyable.

If you don’t mind that slog, there’s a lot about Lost Sea that will keep you coming back. Its very nature means islands won’t be the same, level to level, and the variation between island systems and the baddies you’ll find on them are refreshing enough. It’s quite easy to fly through a level, grabbing the tablet and leaving – and there is an achievement for getting through the game in less than two hours flat – but real pleasure comes from finding a spot to build a bridge, then exploring for an architect ally so you can do so to see what awaits you on the other side. Slow and methodical exploration is where it’s at – even if you’re punished for wanting to do so bit by bit.

All up, Lost Sea is a great game for those who want to take it slow, or for children who are happy enough running around, cutely hacking at dodo birds and mutant frogs without a care in the world. It’s not world-changing, but it’s not too bad either.

Lost Sea was reviewed using a promotional code on Xbox One, as provided by the publisher.

Review: Lost Sea

The good Great in spurts. Harmless, casual fun.	The bad Punishes you for playing in spurts. Your AI allies can be pretty stupid.

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