Personally, I love stories about deserted islands, taking the high seas and looking for adventure or just plain pirating. Robinson Cruseo, Pirates (Michael Crichton), but even Assassins Creed Black Flag/Rogue peek my interest, so Lost Sea should be right up my alley. Right? Let’s find out!
Lost Sea was originally released in 2016 for PS4, Xbox One and PC (Steam), but now sailed its way to the Nintendo Switch eShop. The story revolves around a generic character, which you can pick out of the six standard avatars. After a freak storm over the Atlantic, you wake to find yourself stranded on the shores of a mysterious island chain, located somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. For those unfamiliar with it, the Bermuda Triangle is a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean where a lot of ships, planes, and people ‘disappear’ without a solid explanation. Aliens? Magnetic Fields? Invited to underwater parties in Atlantis? Nobody knows, but it gives speculation and room for crazy theories and games of course! (For more information, check this article)
Gameplay
As Eastasiasoft describes it:
Lost Sea is an explorative action-adventure game set inside the perilous environment of the Bermuda Triangle. Select your hero and recruit a ragtag crew of survivors who can help you navigate the hazardous island chain. Scour each island for the mysterious tablets you need to navigate the waters of the Lost Sea and venture closer to the mysterious portal, that you hope, will transport you home.
And yeh, that’s about it. You select a hero, I chose a guy with a fancy suit and badass hat, venture into the ‘thing’ they call a tutorial and repeat the same trick over and over again. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! The tutorial is not really a tutorial. Basically, it’s an island with easy enemies which won’t kill you, unless you walk into them more than 20 times. The game does not hold your hand in any way, only the basic concepts, like using a machete and moving your character are explained. After you find your first tablet on the tutorial island, it’s off towards the boss-island, with a skull as icon, because it’s a pirate-style game.
This is the part the game really got on my nerves. The tablet behaves like a dice, and decides the ‘islands’ you move forward. In my case, I had a tablet worth two islands – so onwards towards the ‘third’ island I went. Which was classified as ‘Hard’. And boy was it difficult. It had enemies that could kill me with one blow, and since this game features permadeath on the crewmembers, not cool Eastasia. Eventually, I completed the island, with using items and not knowing they were a one time use (or even how to use them, and what they were). I got another tablet which brought me, once again, to an island classified as ‘Hard’. Well, you can guess the rest I guess.
Gamevisuals & Sound
Each island is randomly generated after the tutorial, and they all look neat. It’s a really distinctive artstyle, which I couldn’t really place in a box of what it reminded me off – which is a good thing. I like it when developers try something new, like Nintendo did with Windwaker (hey pirate reference), it was different, but good. Lost Sea is in the same boat. The artstyle is off, but it works for the type of game. In a way it reminded me of a version of Borderlands-art. The music was repetitive and halfway through my first playthrough I muted the sound and put on some off my own music. Sometimes the overworld would bug with the NPCmovement – but that was just because I took some sharp angles, so maybe that’s on me. Framerate was stable, even with the ‘cut scenes’ – in handheld and docked mode, so keep it up Lost Sea.
Main Problem with Lost Sea
Is the game fun? Yes, for a few hours. I played most of it on the plane towards my holiday destination. I finished a total of two runs in the air (a solid 3 hours of gameplay), and where the first run was mostly made of Hard-Hard-Medium-Hard-Easy-Islands – it gave me so many resources to upgrade my ship (health, crewabilities etc.), myself (damage, items I could carry, crewmembers I could control), that the second run was way too easy. It felt very repetitive. Halfway through my third run I quit the game, since I was bored of doing the same thing over, and over again. The crew has permadeath – but they are easily replaced by someone with the same, or even better skillsets. If you upgrade your crew with the perk that they don’t gain damage from quivering in fear, you won’t lose any more crewmembers, so hey.. Pick this up when it’s on discount and you need to kill a few hours.
