Modern indie games seem to take a lot of inspiration from older titles. Titles like Cave Story take heavy inspiration from Metroid and Castlevania, games like Hyper Light Drifter are love letters to the classic 2D Zelda games and The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky take cues from the 1980 cult classic Rogue. These games have revitalized and created new genres over the years. Rogue inspired the roguelikes and these titles inspired the rogue-lites, also known as roguelike-likes. Lost Sea, by eastasiasoft, is one such game.
Taking place in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, Lost Sea puts you in the role of a shipwrecked survivor whose task is to find a bunch of golden tablets hidden around each island, beat up a bunch of enemies and bosses and then get out of the Triangle before you get murdered.
You see, as a roguelike, Lost Sea incorporates certain gameplay elements of its video game brethren with permadeath, procedurally-generated levels and unlockable skills. Unlike most roguelikes, or rogue-lites, Lost Sea pretty much relies on your death in order to push you further into the game. The gameplay revolves around wandering on an island, finding new crew members to help you find the aforementioned tablets. Each crew member has a unique combination of skills, some can unlock chests, some can build bridges to help you reach other places and others can revive you.
Choice in Lost Sea isn’t as wide as it is in other rogue-lites. Due to how little health you have, and how you have no idea if a chest or bush will have any health pick-ups at all, you’ll always want to choose the team member who will either give you health or bring you back to life. On top of this, the AI are some of the most stupid I’ve seen in recent years as they constantly run into enemies, walls, and projectiles which, since the AI crew members also suffer from permadeath, makes the game incredibly frustrating.
The moment to moment gameplay isn’t all that fascinating, but it works. You walk, or run if you have unlocked the ability, towards enemies, slashing them with your machete and gathering up all of that sweet, sweet XP in order to purchase more upgrades to get more XP to get more upgrades. There are barrels that you can break open to get coins which you’ll use to purchase ship upgrades, making your journey from island to island ever so slightly easier.
The main problem with the game is that it wants you to complete it within a single sitting. Saving doesn’t exist and when you die you get an instant XP and coin bonus depending on the amount of tablets you picked up before you got killed. This means that dying and therefore repeating the game over and over again is the best way to play. You go around the islands trying to find crew members who can revive you so you can pick up as many tablets as possible before your eventual death in order to make your next run better from the get go. The only problem with this system is still the lack of any save feature. After you die the tablet-collecting bonus only carries over if you start the next run directly after. If you quit then you get no bonus.
Extended play of any title is bound to bring on boredom at some point and since Lost Sea is designed around playing for as long as possible, it highlights its problems faster than most. Graphically, Lost Sea isn’t much of a charmer. The closest game I can compare to Lost Sea’s visuals is probably Escape Dead Island as it matches both the thick and basic comic-style aesthetic and its very low detailed textures. Everything looks fairly flat and the repetition of assets from level to level, along with the same basic layout for a lot of locations, makes Lost Sea feel like a chore to play after awhile.
In terms of performance, Lost Sea stays stable throughout pretty much everything. While the game isn’t visually impressive by a long shot and there’s never really much happening on screen at any one time, Lost Sea’s performance is pretty much perfect.
Summary
Lost Sea isn’t an exciting game, it’s also very simple. While the game can be fun in short bursts, the gameplay loop is designed around you playing for extended periods of time. This, combined with subpar visuals and fairly simplistic gameplay, makes Lost Sea an unrecommendable title compared to similar games on Xbox One.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.