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It’s very easy to describe how Lost In Random looks – imagine Tim Burton’s stop-motion work stretched across the skeleton of a high fantasy world – but a lot harder to explain how it plays. Even in its early stages, that’s absolutely to its credit; Swedish developer Zoink! (Fe, Stick It to The Man) is making something that plucks some very specific, very disparate heartstrings – claymation movies and deck-building tabletop games – and the tune it’s playing on them is already sounding unexpectedly sweet.

Lost In Random’s world is essentially a feudal system built on dice rolls – every citizen throws a magic die on their twelfth birthday, with chance deciding their future. Roll a one and you’ll be sent to the sunken slums of Onecroft, roll a six and you’re welcomed into the heavenly Sixtopia, with a different town for every number in between. But the game’s hero, Even, begins to suspect the game may be rigged after her older sister Odd rolls a six and is ripped away from her family of Ones, and seemingly sends a ghostly call for help.

What follows is an escape from her assigned home, as Even meets a living, magic die (named Dicey, naturally) and they team up for a journey through all six of Random’s realms – two of which I had the chance to play through in a roughly three-hour hands-on. It’s impossible not to notice Lost In Random’s art style first, with its world not just looking like, but moving like its animated movie inspirations (and how many games can you say remind you of Nightmare Before Christmas more than anything else?). But spending even a little time in the game’s world – full of curiously elongated humans, glum fish-men, and a giant mayor with an evil twin sprouting out of his hat – reveals that it’s living up to that comparison in spirit, too.

Just like its movie references, this feels like a kid-friendly fairytale with an appealingly dark heart. One early sidequest asks you to solve a conflict between two sides of one man’s personality – half of him is emotional, the other half logical. Except the answer here isn’t to mediate between them – it’s to collect tiny, screaming slime-animals so that your chosen half can blend them into a potion and chemically destroy their rival. It’s never graphic, or outwardly grim, but there’s enough at work under the surface of Lost In Random’s population to give you pause.

But no matter how odd its characters might be, combat is where Lost In Random reveals its true strangeness. The game’s told as a broadly linear story, with the major locations unfolded into hub worlds of sorts, peppered with sidequests and collectibles – but tying it all together are fights with Even’s enemies, those trying to stop her reaching Sixtopia for reasons unknown. In appearances, these fights take on the form of a third-person action game, but in reality Lost In Random plays like no action game I’ve laid my hands on. Every battle begins with Even as a practically powerless figure, equipped with a slingshot that does no damage, and a dash ability to escape foes. Both of those harmless abilities can, however, pop the blue crystals that grow periodically out of every one of the game’s enemies. Here’s where it gets weird.

All of Even’s other abilities, from conjuring spectral swords, to spawning traps, to buffing her own stats, are attached to a deck of cards that you build and maintain over the course of the game. Smashing enemy crystals allows you to draw those cards and, once you’ve drawn them, Even can roll Dicey – which immediately slows the real-time combat to a crawl. The number Dicey lands on is essentially the mana you have to spend on your cards – if he lands on a three, for instance, you could spawn a sword (1 mana) and drop a bomb trap (2 mana), using the slowed time to pop it down between three enemies, before scurrying away and firing a slingshot pellet into it to set it off as time returns to its normal pace.

In the game’s early stages at least, it must be said that combat never advances beyond being fairly sluggish – although hits and dashes themselves do at least have some of the cartoon whip and impact you’d hope for from an action game. That decision’s presumably been made so as not to alienate less skilled players, and to make building a good deck the major consideration as you progress. Even by the end of my three hours with the game, the malleability and importance of that deck-building system was already clear to me.

The first time I scrapped the game’s basic deck and rebuilt it, I focused on traps – allowing myself to set off bouncing projectiles and summon up gigantic hands that slapped enemies to the ground. It worked nicely enough, but I’d skimped on regular weaponry, and fairly frequently found myself unarmed and escaping from hordes of partially damaged enemies while I worked up enough energy to build another set of traps. After a visit to the game’s card merchant (a man who either lives inside, or just is part-wardrobe), I was far more tooled-up, and built a deck that balanced offense with trickery, at the expense of healing items.

It was genuinely thrilling to see how those little changes made a difference to combat – just like a board or card game, Lost In Random feels like a tug of war between elements of chance (the cards you draw, the dice you roll), and player skill (the deck you build, and the way you utilise those cards). My suspicion, and my hope, is that the game introduces more and more complex cards as time goes on, balancing Dicey’s increasing power (you can only roll up to a 3 by the end of the game’s second chapter) with decks that turn Even into wildly different kinds of fighter.

All of this comes before you get to the special rounds of combat that turn the fights into a literal board game, with Dicey’s rolls also controlling a giant playing piece, travelling across spaces and offering effects and new threats with every move. I only tried a couple of these, but they felt charmingly frantic – although I’m hoping the rules get a little more complex as time goes on.

I’m sure there will be some for whom the inherent randomness of all this will frustrate more than charm – getting a few unlucky draws and rolls in a row can leave you feeling more vulnerable than you might expect – but for me it plays perfectly into the game’s central ideas.

Like its protagonist, Lost In Random feels as though it’s refusing to accept the rules of the world it’s being born into. In an industry built on games that tend to build on established ideas, Lost In Random already feels like it’s trying to be something new. It looks different, and it plays differently – I suspect that won’t help its sales figures, but those who do play will likely find something surprisingly, appealingly unusual.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

For a smartphone, it doesn’t get much ritzier than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3, short of slapping diamonds and gold onto the frame. The Galaxy Z Fold series has been a showcase for new display technologies coming from Samsung for a few years now, and the Galaxy Z Fold 3 may have finally put just the right amount of polish into the package. But at a jaw-dropping $1,800 price, it costs twice as much as a lot of typical premium smartphones. So let’s see if it manages to double up on capabilities and quality to justify that.

Design and Features

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 is unique among the phones you’ll usually find on store shelves. It’s one of very few phones that feature a folding display and part of an even smaller subset that pack an extra large folding display.

The phone’s design can almost let it fly under the radar. At first glance, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 looks like a somewhat typical smartphone with a 6.2-inch display, albeit one that’s got an unusual amount of bezel for a 2021 Samsung smartphone. Closer inspection reveals the folding nature of the phone. The Galaxy Z Fold 3 can unfold like a book to reveal a 7.6-inch display inside.

Despite the unique design, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 still boasts some of the fit and finish of Samsung Galaxy flagship phones. It’s wrapped in an elegant aluminum frame with Gorilla Glass Victus on the exterior, although a pre-applied screen protector scratches readily. The quirks of the design limit that elegance though, forcing the exterior display to cram in next to the space allotted for the hinge and requiring a screen protector and a crease to be ever present on the internal display. The hinge itself may have some stunning internal design to keep dust and water out – the phone even earns an IPX8 rating for protection against complete submersion in water – but the way the frame of the two sides connects to the hinge lacks style.

As much a Samsung product as ever, the two displays are at least brilliant. Both are pixel-dense Dynamic AMOLED 2X panels with adaptive refresh rates up to 120Hz for exceptional smoothness and dazzling peak brightnesses. That latter detail is crucial, as it’s only when the internal display is brightly lit up that it can hide the otherwise glaring crease down the middle. Unfortunately, this flexible display sees colors shifting and dimming when viewed at off angles, so that rules out using it in a half-open position. The external display works in the half-open position, allowing for hands-free use akin to a 2-in-1 laptop’s tent mode.

The dimensions of the phone get awkward as a result of everything going on here. The phone is tall and thin while closed, and the front display is narrow (24.5:9 aspect ratio!) to the point of being hard to use. The internal display meanwhile is quite large and a close approximation to a square, providing the equivalent of two smartphone screens side by side, but it’s no less awkward to interact with than the external display with its unwieldy size. In both cases, the phone will regularly require two hands. I find I’m stretching to reach things just as often as I’m cramped for space, there isn’t quite a happy medium. At 271 grams, it’s a heavy phone, though not quite as heavy as one might expect for a device this big.

As a premium Samsung flagship, there aren’t many features this phone has skipped out on. It still offers wireless charging, albeit only at 10W speeds rather than the 15W some other Samsung phones can support. It has stereo speakers that pack some punch. Samsung skipped the under-display fingerprint sensor and went for a side-mounted option that works great (and more consistently than the one found on the Galaxy S20). There’s also a sneaky under-display selfie camera built into the interior display. It has a low-resolution array of pixels over it that provide it a modicum of stealth when you’re not looking directly at it, though in truth the design makes it almost stick out so much when you look right at it that I don’t know why Samsung even bothered.

Fans of Samsung’s Note lineup will love the inclusion of support for an S Pen on this phone, although it’s not nearly as integrated as in the Note series. The Galaxy Z Fold 3 supports a special S Pen Fold edition or S Pen Pro on its internal display only, and while it’s effective for scribbling onto that internal display, it doesn’t have all the same features (like a remote camera shutter) that made the S Pen such a powerful tool for the Note series. It is impressive enough that Samsung got the S Pen to work as well as it does given there’s a gap between the two Wacom digitizers where the display crease is. Try as I might, I couldn’t detect any odd behavior while writing over the crease even if I started my lines directly on it.

Software

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 comes running Android with Samsung’s One UI 3 specifically tailored for the Z Series, coming with some extra control to better take advantage of the phone’s multitasking potential and to keep the ship sailing smoothly when it needs to switch back and forth between the two different displays.

The phone’s not overloaded with bloatware, and doesn’t feel like it has strayed very far from the experiences I’ve had on Samsung’s other recent flagships. The new addition here is a taskbar that’s the home for split-screen apps. Apps dragged onto the screen from this taskbar while another app is open can launch in a multi-tasking window, and combinations of apps can be set up to automatically launch side by side. The taskbar will also show recent apps. And, if two apps at a time isn’t enough, the tablet mode supports three apps running side-by-side-by-side. Of course, even with a bigger display, some things get really cramped when you set them up to multitask.

Rearranging windows for multitasking isn’t always intuitive, and it has some shortcomings, like these little GUI bars that sit near the top of a multitasking window no matter what, even if it’s covering up a portion of a video. Samsung also missed an opportunity to provide gamers with an on-screen gamepad, a feature LG nailed with the dual-screen case for some of its final phones (😢), like the LG G8X ThinQ.

Gaming and performance

Samsung really only made one sacrifice when it came to the performance of this phone: battery. Like the rest of the Galaxy S lineup launched this year, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 comes powered by the Snapdragon 888 chipset and all the muscle it packs. The phone performs in line with the likes of the Galaxy S21 and Galaxy S21 Ultra with snappy performance. The Z Fold 3 goes a little further in showing just how much power the Snapdragon 888 chipset offers as the phone is capable of running three apps simultaneously on the large screen, and it doesn’t show signs of struggling under that workload – the 12GB of RAM is proving useful here.

Gaming pushes the phone, but it still runs exceptionally well. I raced around at the highest graphical settings in Asphalt 9, and the only times the phone showed hitches were at the very start of each race as the map was still loading in. Once the race was on, the phone ran perfectly smoothly no matter what chaos was occurring on-screen

The Galaxy Z Fold 3 does get warm while under the load of gaming or multitasking. That heat seemed inevitable for this phone. The thin design doesn’t contribute as well to heat dissipation or extra cooling hardware inside, and the two separate batteries may see things heat up as well. The extra large display is also a bigger power draw, which would see the batteries heat up that much more. It wasn’t getting painfully hot, but it wasn’t comfortable either.

Battery life may not be as impressive as some of the other flagship phones on the market, but the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 actually surprised me. It has a 4,400mAh battery (split into two parts), which is only 10% bigger than the Galaxy S21’s 4,000mAh battery, but the phone has an extra large display to power. Yet, the phone still does a surprisingly good job of lasting through the day. Throughout my testing, I never had it peter out before the day was done, and that included days with lengthy gaming sessions, full two-hour movie viewings, and even a three-hour drive with the Galaxy Z Fold 3 serving as a stupendous GPS device.

Two busy days using the phone’s larger display extensively would be stretching it, but the smaller front-display can help keep battery use low.

Camera

Let’s get this out of the way, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 isn’t offering a camera experience on par with the Galaxy S21 Ultra even though it costs hundreds of dollars more. Most of the cameras on the Z Fold 3 are good, with the main sensor really turning up the heat, but the lack of the periscope zoom lens keeps the performance somewhat limited. That said, shooting photos with the internal screen as a massive viewfinder does make it really easy to preview photos.

The Galaxy Z Fold 3 features the following cameras:

• 12MP Ultrawide at f/2.2
• 12MP Wide at f/1.8 with OIS
• 12MP 2x Telephoto at f/2.4 with OIS
• 10MP Front-facing (exterior) at f/2.2
• 4MP Front-facing (interior) at f/1.8

Shooting with the Galaxy Z Fold 3 is a curious task. There are cameras everywhere. The small external screen has its own punchhole selfie camera while the large internal screen has an under-display camera, and then there are the three cameras on the back of the phone.

The external selfie camera is decent, capturing sharp details and realistic colors even in dimmer conditions. But, anyone looking for a great selfie can use the main cameras by opening the phone and continuing to use the external display as a viewfinder. It’s a tad clunky, but it nets much better photo results. The internal selfie camera is far worse, capturing less detail and offering color that’s more akin to a budget webcam’s. Given the only reason to use the internal camera is likely for a video chat while multitasking, the quality may be acceptable.

The rear camera system provides a wide, ultra-wide, and 2x zoom camera. Samsung has done a good job here of making the coloring appear consistent between the three different cameras, and there’s not a dramatic trade-off in image quality when switching from one sensor to the others. They take some quality shots, especially in good lighting conditions, though the main sensor is the only one that holds up as well in darker environments.

I noticed wishy-washy behavior from the phone deciding which sensor it would use for a shot, often opting to use the main sensor for a zoom shot even when set to 4x zoom. This was a behavior I ran into on the Galaxy S21 Ultra, but in this case it’s not caused by my finger confusing any laser AF sensor as there is none. The main sensor does well enough for a 2x zoom, but beyond that I feel the actual zoom lens would perform better even if it’s not getting as much light. A zoom factor of 2x is pretty disappointing in this case, as Samsung has shown how much further it can go with the S21 Ultra, and the digital zoom caps off at 10x while providing results that don’t hold up against even the Galaxy S20’s zoom capabilities in a side-by-side shootout.

Samsung’s photo smarts are also a little lacking when it comes to deciding on when to use Night Mode. I’m often trying to snag a shot of the cats in darker settings, and the phone will frequently switch to a long exposure, guaranteeing a bad result if the cats move, and it’ll do so even if the photo would have been acceptably lit without Night Mode engaging.

It’s a new month, and that can only mean one thing. That’s right, a new batch of LEGO sets is available to buy or preorder. This month’s new releases are kind of all over the map, ranging from advent calendars to a massive Batmobile Tumbler, and even a soccer stadium. Let’s have a look, shall we?

New LEGO Releases and Preorders for September 2021

New LEGO Jurassic World Sets

• Baryonyx Dinosaur Boat Escape – $79.99
• Carnotaurus Dinosaur Chase – $49.99
• Stygimoloch Dinsaur Escape – $39.99
• T Rex Dinosaur Fossile Exhibition – $29.99

New LEGO 2021 Advent Calendars

• LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2021 – $39.99
• LEGO Marvel’s Avengers Advent Calendar 2021 – $39.99
• LEGO Harry Potter Advent Calendar 2021 – $39.99
• LEGO Friends Advent Calendar 2021 – $29.99

• LEGO City Advent Calendar 2021 – $29.99

The star of the show this month is the LEGO DC Batman Batmobile Tumbler. This set is up for preorder now at the LEGO Store (it already sold out at Amazon) for $229.99, with a release date of November 1. It’s a huge 2,049-piece replica of the battle-ready Batmobile from the Christopher Nolan films. Designed for adults, it comes with a buildable stand and placard for display, plus Batman and Joker minifigs.

If you like the Batmobile Tumbler but don’t want to drop a couple hundred bucks on it, you can pick up a smaller version instead for $39.99 (this one is available at Amazon and the LEGO Store). This one is a 422-piece build and it comes with minifigures of Batman and Scarecrow.

One other massive build that’s now available exclusively at the LEGO Store is for fans of football (or soccer, as it’s known stateside). It’s Camp Nou – FC Barcelona, a 5,509-piece build that’s colorful and generally fantastic looking. It’s also a set that’s geared toward adults and is meant to be set on a shelf.

Finally, this year’s 2021 LEGO advent calendars are now available for purchase. They’re always popular items, especially for anyone with kids. They come with 24 mini builds or minifigs, and are intended to be opened one per day from December 1 – 24.

Pretty good month for LEGO releases, IMO.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

Spoilers follow for Episode 4 of Marvel’s What If…? For more, see our review of the previous episode of What If.

Doctor Strange, with his limitless magical potential, has always felt like one the MCU’s most dangerous wild cards, and What If’s fourth episode makes clear why. As the guardian of our reality, Strange’s cosmic perspective and access to the Time Stone has mostly been a blessing up to this point – the upcoming events of Spider-Man: No Way Home notwithstanding – but here, the consequences of Strange obsessing over his great power with no thought to the great responsibility that follows it are dire. The Sorcerer Supreme’s descent into grief-stricken madness is an effective cautionary tale about what loss can do to a person and furthers the argument that these more mature stories are What If’s bread and butter. And that ending!

Episode 4 takes the foundation of Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) mystical journey – the car accident that took his hands – and twists fate by putting Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) in the passenger seat. Strange losing the use of his hands was already an understandable motivator for his journey to Kamar-Taj in his solo film, but Christine’s death puts him in an even more desperate state of mind by the time he gets there. He’s still able to defeat Dormammu and become Sorcerer Supreme, but the Time Stone around his neck hangs heavier and heavier as Strange’s power grows.

While Strange is able to time travel back to the night of the accident, nothing he does saves Christine from dying: it’s a nexus event, or an “absolute point in time” as this episode refers to it. While our understanding of a nexus event’s importance to the MCU’s plot going forward is still growing, the concept is used wonderfully in this episode to represent the effects of tragedy, of loss so painful we’d unmake the world to reverse it. Strange’s centuries-spanning marathon of summoning monsters to absorb their power is a great illustration of this, evoking his intense focus on bargaining with Dormammu at any personal cost. With each creature (or evil garden gnome) absorbed, Strange literally becomes more of a monster. There’s an element of Gothic horror to the whole episode, with Strange positioned as both Doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein as he learns the cost of his meddlesome hubris. What If is a great vehicle for these morality plays when it can avoid dipping too much into the fan service well for easy thrills.

Cumberbatch turns in a good vocal performance, especially when Strange’s inability to save Christine is turning the screws in his mind. Rachel McAdams has a thankless role as little more than the source of Strange’s grief, but she does get time to bring some intensity to her performance in her final scene.

The episode does occasionally strain itself explaining the temporal shenanigans going on, overcomplicating the story by revealing that the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) used the power of the Dark Dimension to create two versions of Doctor Strange in the same reality. Strange being “half a man, living half a life” is distracting, an unnecessary development that feels engineered just to give us a Strange vs. Strange magic fight scene at the end. The MCU is getting a little too obsessed with these mirror grudge matches, and all the glowy ropes and portals in the multiverse fail to make the whole “you’re literally your own worst enemy” bit feel fresh. In fact, most of this episode’s strongest visual moments are the more emotionally evocative ones, like the shadows of Strange’s new horde of inner demons giving way to his new gaunt appearance. Despite the Ancient One’s distracting involvement, the story sticks its landing, taking one of the darkest turns in MCU history going into the final moments.

The totality of Evil Strange’s failure comes crashing down on him when The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) finally reveals himself, which we get a tease of earlier on when Strange hears him through whatever cosmic noise cancelling The Watcher uses to narrate to the viewer. He’s been promising he won’t interfere and, even with reality collapsing around Evil Strange, he holds true to his word. Seeing What If commit to creating a pocket universe for a single episode and then letting the hero’s choices be so devastating that they destroy that universe was incredibly gratifying, and it also gave us some important insight into The Watcher. This is the first time we’ve seen him actively ignore a character in need, instead chiding Strange for his failings. It’s an interesting development for such a dispassionate character, one who extols the importance of choice while being defined by his own apathy.

What If has the freedom to tell any kind of story that it wants, stories the live-action MCU movies may not have the courage to tackle, so ending on such a down note was an excellent reminder of the fresh possibilities that freedom allows for. Of course, there’s a Sword of Damocles hanging over every choice What If “commits” to: it’s impossible to know if any consequences are final. Sure, abandoning a corrupted Stephen Strange screaming in a collapsing reality is a bold and dark choice, but it’s also easy to picture The Watcher or some villain undoing that drama by plucking him out just to give the “Altvengers” What If is setting up someone to fight in the finale. Or to give Sacred Timeline Strange some extra madness in the multiverse to deal with once his solo sequel hits screens next year…