Lost in Tropics Review

Lost in Tropics is a roguelite survival game developed by Lukas GameLabs and published by SIG Publishing. In this game, your goal is to survive 21 days and get the highest score. Easy, right? Well, those three weeks might not be a long time, it'll be a hard time. You'll be lucky to go a week before something goes horribly wrong. And the first thing that happened? Suffered a freeze, and I had to restart… before the game even started.

You know, maybe I should've checked the Steam page earlier…

Okay, let’s start off with starting a new game. Before you go on your survival adventure, you need to pick a character to play as. Each one has randomised traits that can affect how you play. Some traits make characters allergic to certain foods, while others have various fears that will affect their sanity and how much damage they take. However, the bigger the weakness, the better the score, so you might want to choose the more difficult characters. Hey, it would make a good underdog story. You do also get to choose a starting item before you start surviving, but most of them are locked until you unlock some upgrades, so you’re pretty much good to go with the first item you can choose: the axe.

Anyways, let's get to surviving. Once you start your game, you'll spawn onto a small island (it would literally take about 15 seconds to sprint from one end to the other) with nothing but your starting item, so you better get to work quickly. You have your health, sanity, hunger, thirst, and energy to maintain, as letting them drop to zero would be hazardous to your run's length. I did find these to be really basic, though. I broke my leg and it only cut my max HP down, no penalties to my movement speed at all. Still, it’s the usual survival affair where you find the nearest tree or rock and smash it to collect its materials. There are crabs to cook (cooking is just putting it on the fire and waiting) and coconuts to crack open to keep you fed and hydrated, but you aren’t getting anywhere close to a full week without help.

Each character is randomised to have different traits, both positive and negative.

However, you aren’t stranded alone. You have a companion with you to help you survive. The companion in question is a… dirty girl in nothing but a coconut bra and a g-string. I… I like girls, but this feels kind of scummy when they're essentially an NPC slave. What’s worse is that she will be one of your constant worries. She is really high maintenance, as she has her own happiness and hunger bars that drain faster than you would think. You will need to keep her happy and fed because she’s the only person who knows how to craft items and she can go and hunt for materials and food herself if you tell her to. If either bar is empty, she won’t perform your commands. She can’t die, but she can’t help either. What should’ve been a nice friend who would help make life easier was actually an annoyance that hindered my experience.

So, every day of my island survival entailed running around, spearing crabs and collecting whatever resource I could find before heading back to dump my stuff back at camp, cooking some food (mostly crabs), feeding myself and my companion, and telling her to craft some stuff or collect crap before doing it all over again until nightfall… where I would have to figure out the correct distance from the campfire so that I could regenerate my sanity and health without overheating. As time goes on, island events will occur to add some spice to your survival, such as giant Asian wasps, parasitic infections, and crab rebellions. They are really aggravating and don’t add much to the experience. They certainly make crabs and wasps more dangerous, but it doesn’t quite change my routine all that much.

...Really?

The most trouble I had was trying to find stones. While you can get your companion to collect some, you'll get it faster if you find the stones yourself… if you know where to look. There are several rocks on the island and most of them aren't breakable. You either need to find a specific rock that spawns randomly each day (which I believe isn't a guaranteed spawn) or collect stones off the ground, which can be hard to see despite the green sparkle around them.

After a run, either from dying or giving up, you get to increase your chances of surviving longer by buying upgrades that will permanently improve your characters… or at least, according to the Steam page and an assumption. I couldn't find any sort of option to allow you to do that, no matter how much I searched. Do I need to beat a run to do it? Am I missing something? Or did the game not teach me well enough to play it properly?

That feeling persisted throughout my entire playthrough, along with aggravation and boredom.

Wait a minute, I took this screenshot I swear there were trees. WHERE ARE THE TREES!?

If you want more problems, well, the load times are a little long, but having to listen to stupidly loud main menu music made it all the more aggravating. There are some noticeable issues with the translation as well (assuming it is a translation). The continue option on the main menu was in Chinese, and the death/give up messages (yes, there are two at the same time) are “TAP OUT” and “TAPED OUT”. Now that I think about it, shouldn’t the title be “Lost in the Tropics”? I mean, there is a game from 1994 called Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics, but I don’t think it would be too much trouble. And while I didn’t notice anything too glitchy, I have seen some Steam reviews mention encountering bugs. It ran decently, though, so there is that… but you also can’t rebind your controls.

If you’ve read my review of Survival: Fountain of Youth, you should know that while I do find the game to be rather tedious, there is plenty to like about it, you just need to put in the work. None of that is in Lost in Tropics, though. It actually has the opposite problem, where everything is kind of going too fast, and you need to develop your shelter and equipment as fast as you can, or else you are not surviving the whole 21 days. I decided to give up after one week. The kicker? I’ve been playing on the standard challenge the whole time. There’s an even harder mode! And it all takes place on the same small damn island, no changes from what I can tell, which would’ve at least added some incentive to try the harder mode other than a high score.

I don’t recommend getting Lost in Tropics, even if it is pretty cheap and on sale. It’s barely a survival game, and I can’t even tell if it was a roguelite. There are better games that will last you longer than three real weeks than the three in-game weeks this game asks of you.