All the best children’s stories have a vein of gristly darkness running through them. Or so the argument goes, anyway – and it’s obvious from the very first moment you lay eyes on Lost In Random that developer Zoink agrees. Tim Burton is the obvious comparison point here, specifically his work in animation: like The Nightmare Before Christmas’s Halloween Town, everything is spindly and rickety, with cracked surfaces held together by thick stitches. And while Burton might be the better-known touchstone, we’d argue director Henry Selick is really the one who should be calling EA to discuss royalties.
The darkness runs deeper than the surface, though, with a story that picks up a tradition of nightmares from Grimm to Dahl to Gaiman – specifically, Selick’s stop-motion adaptation of Coraline, which is surely the single biggest influence. Here, the young girl wandering into the unknown is Even, chasing her kidnapped sister Odd through the worlds of Random.