This week several of us played review copies of Lost Sea, a game that launched yesterday on XBox One and launches on July 5th on PS4 and PC. We have decided to come together and write a collaborative review that allows us to discuss our thoughts about the game more comprehensively*.
Lost Sea (Eastasiasoft Ltd 2016) is being billed as an action adventure game, but plays more like a roguelike along the lines of Spelunky or Rogue Legacy. You begin the game as a shipwrecked explorer who is the latest to be trapped in the Bermuda Triangle. You awake on the shore of an island, find a machete, and begin hacking your way around. You encounter another shipwrecked soul, who identifies himself as a “leading scientist” who is searching for his assistant. In order to escape the islands, you have to assemble a crew from people you meet along the way and collect “tablets” you find on each of the islands. The storyline is very linear. So much so that there isn’t even a quest log, because you’re only doing one thing at a time.
The Mechanics:
[Alex] The controls are very solid. Nothing is more annoying that a camera that doesn’t work properly so you can’t see things you should be able to. This game sidesteps that by having solid camera and controller controls. The fighting is pretty straightforward as well. For being a small, cutesy game, the mechanics are very good.
[Jynx] Can you actually hurt your crew members? Or just stun them? I never saw them take actual damage (the numbers typically being -10 or -5 like from monsters). Also , there seemed to be weird mechanics, like the ability to get hurt during cutscenes and the camera not centering behind the player, but to the axis of the island.
[Alex] I like that they don’t try to always auto center the camera; it’s like fps’s where you totally control the angle.
[Jynx] Ah, that makes sense. I tend to get turned around (something something no sense of direction) so I like when I can center the camera to point into a vague “North,” but it’s not required.
[Sam] I was annoyed by the fact that the assistants would immediately start to cower when they encountered an enemy and this left them vulnerable to being killed quickly. It also made it necessary for you to put yourself in immediate danger to go back and retrieve them (and possibly the tablet that they were carrying) in order to complete the level. At moments like this they became more of a hindrance than a help. That being said, I did like the fact that you could have them carry the tablet in the first place since taking any damage meant that you automatically dropped the tablet…and I took a lot of damage.
[Jynx] The assistants were pretty interesting because they certainly were helpful–racking up extra experience was always fun–but after awhile, it seemed there were no “new” skills. Besides Miner, Locksmith, Carpenter, Revive, Survivalist, Strength in Numbers, and Tough. All skills could be seen and used before beating the first area. After you found a good one or two, what was the point of finding any more?
[Alex] I don’t really understand the purpose of using so many different types of assistants right up front when you don’t get to save them or use them again if they aren’t your active assistant when you leave the island. I would have preferred if you could cycle through them depending on what you need. It seems like a missed opportunity to not let you “level up” and form better attachments to specific assistants. I missed a lot of cool assistants because I wanted to form an attachment to one.
[Sam] It may be very well that we didn’t see some of the more advanced assistants because we died too quickly or didn’t jump through the proper hoops to get there. And I have played quite a bit of the game, but I have yet to unlock the additional slots so that I can have more than one assistant at a time. But again I am the first to admit that while I love roguelikes, I completely suck at them. I have spent some time streaming the game and chatting with folks watching and it was actually fun to get some pointers based on things that other folks had discovered (but that never got clearly articulated in the tutorial or during the game play).
[Jynx] There are things, like the clock in the top right, that aren’t explained at all. The saving mechanic is 
also not explained. A mini-map on screen would be infinitely more useful than a compass that points back to the dock. Also what Items are and what they do can only be figured out AFTER they are used. There’s no “check items” option.
[Sam] I am so with you on the item descriptions and the saving. I was really kind of pissed that I burned my first med kit by mistake as I was trying to figure out how much health it would replace and whether or not it would also raise the assistant’s HP. Also I need this game to save between islands because sometimes I need to stop what I am playing and go do things. Sometimes my kid needs me or my cat is an asshole and turns the console off (she likes playing with the light on the front) and I lost a whole level’s worth of play because it only made sense to me that I should be able to come back and play the “Boss” island later instead of powering through.
However, I think that the compass and the sundial are a matter of preference. In a game like this where the maps are fairly small I really liked just having the compass point me back to the dock. I just knew that it was always going to be necessary for me to pull up the larger map to see where other things might be hidden on the island. It kind of reminded me of the RPGs that I play on my 3DS.
[Jynx] Maps are procedurally generated, which is fine, but they don’t seem to have a lot on them. It becomes very easy to determine what is going to be on each map very quickly. Paying just a little bit of attention means that you can predict exactly what enemies will spawn where, etc. For example, there is a place where there is a treasure chest on what looks like a shrine. Walking up to it the first time, I did not expect to get ambushed at the gate. However, the next time I encountered the same setup of the gate, I got “ambushed” but was prepared for it. Then the same set up happened again and…
[Sam] I actually prefer procedurally generated worlds. While knowing where things are can be helpful in terms of scaffolding new skills and the like (ie games like Super Mario Bros.), I think that procedurally generated worlds add a little excitement. It’s fun to head around the corner and not know until the last minute that there are two cavemen waiting to take you out (though I do hate the fact that 2 hits from them basically kill you).
[Alex] I don’t really have a preference one way or another, but I do think that the procedurally generated worlds work well in this game. With such a simplistic game, there has to be some element of change in order to have replayability and to keep players from getting bored as they move through the narrative.
The Narrative:
[Jynx] Very simple story, I agree. It definitely isn’t the focus and seems to be the least important thing about the game. It does play, a little, like a Facebook game or Empty Diablo. The drive to escape the island or “find the portal” or what have you isn’t really there past the tutorial, but at least things aren’t popping up all the time telling me to invite friends. It’s fun, and simple, but not very compelling at times.
Since I’m a story person: I don’t know the connection between the adventurers. In games like Rogue Legacy, when you die, you “continue your family line.” However, in this game, you (can) pick a different survivor and keep going. Why do they get your experience from the tablets, then? Are they on your ragtag ship the whole time? Are they at base camp? Did they just crash after you died and loot your corpse? However, answering these questions may not be the point of the game. Not all games need a complex narrative to be fun, and simple narratives are fine and dandy in cases. I spend most of my time in JRPGs, so I tend to forget other games exist, after all.
[Alex] My thoughts on the narrative: what narrative? It’s the same story we see again and again in Facebook and iOS games. However, I love that kind of thing, so I’m not complaining. However, I think if you don’t have a narrative, you should allow some kind of collecting or leveling so that you don’t feel like your play time is dust in the wind.
[Sam] The light narrative means that there is less quest text for Alex to skip! But I actually agree with Alex this time (and I usually love huge narratives), I like it this way. This is a game that I would love to see ported to the Vita or 3DS. While I might do a few short play sessions here and there on my main consoles I would definitely play a whole lot more on a handheld device. The maps are small and simple enough that they would work well on the small screen.
[Alex] My mantra: skip the narrative, mute the volume.
The Achievements:
[Alex] There are a lot of achievements in this game. It’s always fun to collect achievements, though at the start of the game you seem to gain one for just playing through doing the things you have to do anything, but I imagine they will get more meaningful along the way.
[Sam] I love easy achievements. There is something deeply satisfying about hearing the ding that I know is adding 10, 20, or 30 more points to my gamerscore! But in all seriousness they seem to mirror the achievements that you get in Spelunky where it was actually pretty nice to get an achievement for dying 1,000 times since I was going to do that anyway!
The Avatars:
[Alex] The avatars are cartoony and fun looking. There is a noticeable lack of diversity among the choices—most are blonde or red headed and fair skinned. There are no options to make the character look, sound, or feel more like you. The sound of the avatar I chose is extremely annoying. Every time I swipe to break a box or something open (which is pretty much every few seconds) I groan like I am in a tennis match. I ended up having to turn the sound down to play.
[Sam] While I was pretty excited to see the Amelia Earhart themed character (probably stemming for my 
mother’s love of Earhart and the connection that I feel with the Earhart archives here on campus), I was disappointed to see that there were no apparent characters of color to choose from. Of the 8 characters offered 5 were male bodied and 3 were female bodied (while being fully clad) and all appeared to be white. The only time that I saw any racial diversity was in the assistant characters who were NPCs and completely disposable. Their only role was to serve the main character and their most useful attribute (ie Revive) were not replenishable. The physical characterization of the Black characters was also problematic as they were all stereotypically dark complected and thick-lipped. I worry whenever I see any game that has an island theme because there is immediately the possibility that characterizations are going to be horribly stereotypical.
[Jynx] It’s 2016, can we stop casting indigenous people as half naked folks with skulls on their heads that go “mumbo”?
Overall:
[Jynx] This game is like mashed potatoes. Simple, pretty solid but nothing super dynamic about it. It needs more to make it provide substantive. Fun, but I probably wouldn’t buy it myself.
[Alex] Overall I liked the game, just like I liked the 10 that came before it. I could get obsessed with this game if it did 2 things: 1) included some kind of collecting items or building up of a home base and 2) was on the iPad. {Jynx: Yes, it would make a great mobile game or base building adventure}
[Sam] I think that Lost Sea is the kind of game that I would like mechanically (especially if they fixed the save issue), but the stereotypical characterization is a serious barrier for me. I think that Jynx is right, we should have moved past these kinds of representations of indigenous people by this point. But absent that the game could be pretty good, light fun for some gamers.
*NB: we did receive free review codes from Eastasiasoft Ltd. Sam and Alex played on the XBox One and Jynx played on the PS4
