From the Archives: Lost Sea

From the Archives: Lost Sea

You roguelite up my life.

Limited Run’s seventh game release wasn’t so much a lucky number seven as a timely one. In some senses, Eastasiasoft’s Lost Sea was the most contemporary and modern of the company’s titles to date at the time of its July 2016 release. Here, the publisher dipped a toe into the burgeoning new genre known as the roguelite.

Lost Sea begins with a simple premise: You, an explorer, have become stranded in a series of mysterious archipelagos thanks to the otherworldly shenanigans of the Bermuda Triangle. Your single goal is simply to escape the islands and return to civilization, which you can only accomplish by tracking down area maps inscribed on the stone tables scattered around each island. Along the way, you can team up with other lost travelers, seek treasures, and trade in cash and experience points to upgrade your ship and your own survivability.

There’s a distinct “final days of the British Empire” vibe to Lost Sea’s character and vehicle designs. You begin the game by selecting one of eight characters that include professorial gentlemen, Edwardian lady adventurers, and local islanders. Your choice of avatar is strictly cosmetic, as all eight survivors play alike, and they all begin their adventure amidst the flotsam of their wrecked vehicle.

Within moments of regaining consciousness, you stumble across a machete that allows you to whack bushes to clear paths, and whack enemies to prevent them from attacking you. The wild animals and humanoid beasts that populate the lost archipelago really only have one thing in common: They hate you and want you dead. Your machete is your primary source of offense as you venture forth, and it has no upgrade chain—it’s the trusty bushwhacker that’ll see you through to the end. Your explorer has only the most basic skills at their command: They can walk, hit things with your machete, and carry stuff. That’s it, and somehow that’s supposed to see you through six increasingly harrowing sets of islands filled with deadly hazards, where one bad hit can end your adventure and reset hours of effort.

In true roguelite fashion, Lost Sea is a one-and-done kind of affair. If your adventurer falls in combat, that’s it: All your progress is lost, and it’s back to the start. The developers were so serious about this that the game doesn’t even have a suspend feature; the only way to take a break is to put the PlayStation 4 into rest mode. 100 hit points is all that stands between you and losing hours of progress… well, sort of.

As you soon learn, your avatar isn’t the only lost soul on these islands. As your journey unfolds, you’ll constantly bump into other castaways. You can ask them to tag along with you and help on your quest. The other refugees can’t help in combat—they simply cower helplessly in place when monsters go on the attack—but each potential crew member comes with their own randomized set of skills. Some are extra tough and can endure many more attacks than your own hero. Others amplify your attack power, allowing you to take out durable bad guys in a single hit. Some can dig for buried treasure, unlock chests you find along the way, or repair broken bridges. And the most valuable crew members have the ability to revive you once if you fall in combat, essentially allowing you to cheat permadeath… at least for a moment, anyway.

Each crew member can possess as many as four special skills. Sometimes you’ll find a crew member whose traits are exactly what you need for a given island, but more often you’ll need to make compromises and decide which attribute is most essential at that moment. In the early going, this means you’ll have to make trade-offs between desperately needed survival traits and helpful utility skills. Say there’s a rare healing station on the other side of a gap that can only be crossed by finding a crew member capable of building a bridge—but if your health is already dangerously low, wouldn’t it be smarter to stick with a companion who can revive you if you slip up in combat and take a fatal elephant tusk to the face?

As you play, however, these trade-offs become less critical, because you can customize your skills to adapt. Defeating enemies nets you experience points, which you can redeem at the dock on each island to boost your innate capabilities. Add-on skills include combat abilities like dash attacks and spin slashes, but even more essential is expanding your passive powers in useful ways. You can increase the number of expendable items like health kits and body armor you can carry, and you can also boost your crew from one to three followers. On top of that, you can trade in the cash you uncover on the island to upgrade your ship, which grants abilities like spotting potential crew members more easily, enriching your options as you move from island to island.

Ultimately, however, the most important thing to seek out as you venture into the islands isn’t crew members or cash but rather the stone tablets you’ll find hidden as you explore. Each island consists of multiple hexagonal areas, each of which can contain a variety of landscape types ranging from fields of dense shrubbery to abandoned mining towns or craggy hillsides. What you really want to uncover are the ancient temple ruins, since they’re most likely to contain the mysterious glowing statues where you can collect a stone tablet that charts a route to other islands. Once you acquire a tablet and carry it back to the docks, you can hop aboard your ship and use the information inscribed on the tablet to reach the next island in the chain. A single island can contain anywhere from one to three tablets, and the more tablets you acquire at a time, the greater the number of options you have for advancing to the end of the current archipelago.

Once you choose to depart your current island, Lost Sea works almost like a board game. Each tablet is inscribed with a number between 1 and 4 that determines the number of spaces—that is, islands—you can skip ahead that turn. If you acquire a tablet with a value of 2, you can only move ahead to the second island forward in the chain. But if you acquire tablets worth 2, 3, and 4 all at once, you can move ahead either two, three, or four islands that turn. While making the largest leap possible might seem the logical choice—since your goal is ultimately to forge ahead and reach the end of the current chain and advance to the next—that’s not always the case. Each island is rated in terms of difficulty (either normal, medium, or hard), and some islands contain special hidden treasures worth seeking out.

There are 18 treasures to find across the islands, and they’re the only thing that carries over permanently from one game to the next. When your explorer dies, you are sent back to the very first island and lose all your boat and skill upgrades, but the treasures remain a permanent part of your collection. The only other permanent improvement you can earn is the ability to warp to later island chains you’ve already reached when you start a new game, in case you don’t want to muck around with the jungle islands yet again. Once more, this isn’t necessarily as intuitive a choice as you might think: While it’s handy to be able to bypass the early areas, the game’s difficulty rises dramatically beyond those islands, to a point where a freshly rolled explorer will have a tough time surviving long enough to build up their skills on advanced islands.

In other words, Lost Sea is your basic roguelite. It’s not a proper RPG, yet it’s nevertheless infused with the risk-reward choices that make games like Mystery Dungeon and Nethack so engrossing. There’s a sense of impermanence to everything in Lost Sea—not only for your fragile protagonist and their hard-earned upgrades, but even to the crew members who can tag along behind you and potentially die from a hard-hitting bad guy before ever making use of their unique skills. It’s a textbook example of the genre’s appeal.

There’s one other feature of note about Lost Sea: It was Limited Run’s very first day-one release. Lost Sea debuted digitally on multiple platforms on July 4, 2016, the same day that the PlayStation 4 physical edition launched as Limited Run Games catalog #012.