izigame.me

Putting this review up so there is some perspective from someone who didn't receive the game for free. I completed the game in approximately 2.5 hours (which is a bit of a warning if you care about the money to playtime ratio).
TL DR: a responsive, snappy room-based roguelite akin to Hades. Lovely Burton meets Alice in Wonderland aesthetic to it, for a lack of a more accurate description. Lovely voice acting. Does come with typical roguelite issues and doesn't innovate much. You basically get what it says on the box with little to push the, by now well-established formula forward.
The gameplay loop is super familiar and honestly a little bland. Slash and dash will be 99% of your inputs. Occasionally you get access to a "card attack", which is some powerful, customizable effect. You can also throw your die, which functions as a sort-of ranged damage/install, depending on what items you obtained. The card attack is charged by dealing damage, which is generally a nice way to go about it as it rewards competent play as opposed to perpetuating being passive. Unfortunately the designers here did not fully capture why this implementation is great to mitigate passive play (akin to Hyper Light Drifter), which I will talk about in a bit. The die throw can be replenished by picking it back up. The implementation of the die feels extremely gimmicky and shoehorned into the game because it had to be there. Not only does the randomize effect have VERY little impact on how the game plays (outside a few events explicitly designed for it) there are also a lot of upgrades that condition themselves such that NOT interacting with it is BETTER for you (e.g. "die will periodically..." or "when you have the die on your back..."). This is typical roguelite noise that interferes with how expressive the actual game is; less is more sometimes.
Arguably my biggest problem with Lost in Random: The Eternal Die is that it offers permanent ranged options (a bow, in this case). With this simple inclusion the designers have essentially put themselves into a split: do we design enemies around the assumption the player has permanent ranged options or do we design it around melee? This is for example why I enjoy Hyper Light Drifter's design so much: it focuses around the latter and it CAN do that, because ranged options are inherently tied to using the former. The result in this game's case is that the bow just trivializes the entire game (I completed 2 bosses in my first attempt in a row using it, on my second run, without having encountered them before -- clearly this isn't the intended pacing here).
Visual clarity is OK, but not good. Color palettes are used at random. Some AoE effects are very transparent for some reasons (like poison clouds left by enemies). The background is very little invasive however, which was a pet peeve of mine in Hades, so it's never hard to distinguish what you are supposed to focus on from background noise. I fear that in later levels the particle spam will become very annoying. The communication on enemy telegraphing is not good, but the game is easy enough this doesn't become a huge pain. It is completely unclear to me how the enemy stagger state works for example; it seems to work up to some limit and then they break free? It also doesn't seem to work on all enemies.
The roguelite element is done in a very unique way. You slot upgrades into a grid to essentially play match-3. As you can never fully plan ahead on what new tokens you are going to be entering this creates a nice pace-breaking distraction. Unfortunately, as all roguelites, I do fear this small spatial managing game will become very stale very quickly as optimal solutions are uncovered.
Overall I like this game. It's inoffensive. It looks and sounds good. It's not great or innovative from a design perspective.