Lost in Blue Review - DS

Lost in Blue 2 is actually the third in the series to come out here in America. The very first had a less poetic, but more descriptive name – Konami called it Survival Kids, because it was about a couple of kids trying to survive.

Specifically, the two kids (a boy and a girl) are shipwrecked together on the classic deserted island. You can guess how this might develop in the context of, say, Cinemax, but Konami’s more interested in the mundane than the romantic. It’s the player’s job to explore the island, gather items, learn how to use them, and keep the kids alive until somebody comes to rescue them.

If you’re struggling for a game to compare this to, think of Harvest Moon, or something else from the school of life simulations that revolve around simple, repetitive tasks. Boil the design template all the way down and eventually you have a Tamagotchi toy – feed it, play with it, repeat.

Lost in Blue mixes in adventure and RPG elements, especially as you dig your way deeper into the game, but much of your time will still be spent on the simple, repetitive tasks needed for survival. There’s an audience that enjoys this kind of gameplay, as evidenced by the cult behind the Harvest Moon series (and the full-blown religion surrounding Nintendogs), but others may wonder whether staying alive is worth all the effort.

A Tale of a Fateful Trip

Before any of the fun Robinson Crusoe stuff comes into play, the kids have basic needs to meet – warmth, water, and food. Building a fire in a cave near a stream takes care of the first two problems, and there’s plenty of seaweed and coconut scattered around to keep the latter in check.

Even the mundane tasks involve little DS mini-games. Fire-by-friction takes some rhythmic button-tapping and blowing into the microphone. With cooking, you have the choice between slicing stuff up raw, or “flipping” items over the fire until they’re grilled just right.

The trouble is, staying alive takes a lot of work. Early in the game, when the kids’ cooking and hunting techniques aren’t up to par, they have to eat ridiculous amounts of food to keep their hunger statistics out of the red. That means repeating the same little touch-screen activities far beyond the point where the novelty wears off. Whichever character is controlled by the AI – you can initially choose to play as the guy or the girl – doesn’t pull much weight, either, so it’s a constant trial to schlep in and out of the cave trying to keep them fed and watered.

Three Hour Tour

Altogether, the beginning of the game is so miserable that a lot of players will probably give up within an hour or two. Both characters start out in a fairly deep hole, and the hunger statistic is jiggered such that the lower it goes, the harder it is to get back up into the safe range. It should go without saying that getting too low on stamina makes it even harder to go out and find enough food, and so on around the vicious cycle. A simple mistake like accidentally tapping the “rest” command can waste a crippling amount of stamina points.

Eventually, eating all that seaweed pays off a bit. Exploring more territory reveals more new items, which facilitate new ways of snagging more nourishing food, which frees up more time for doing stuff that’s actually fun, like hunting, domesticating animals (if you’d like to milk goats with the touch screen, you can), and seeing the sights of the island. The boring beaches and lowlands from the early stages of the game eventually give way to more complex and picturesque jungles and swamps. At this point, Lost in Blue becomes less of a fiddly survival simulation and more like an old-school adventure game, with puzzles to solve and some concrete goals to work toward.

Primitive As Can Be

Also at this point, however, players of the first Lost in Blue may wonder how original the sequel’s experience really is. Lost in Blue 2 adds the ability to play as either character (although not both characters at once), as well as more and different kinds of touch-screen mini-games, but the progression and pacing of the game are remarkably similar.

Some of those new mini-games aren’t necessarily welcome additions, either. Cooking was automated in the original game -- in classic pre-sexual-revolution style, the male main character brought home the bacon and the AI-controlled girl sidekick cooked up those raw materials. The sequel splits the duties more evenly, adding mini-games for doing the cooking yourself, but that’s not necessarily an improvement. Cooking the same stuff over and over again, with the same simple tap-tap-tap mini-games, is a big part of the reason the early game is so boring.

Lost in Blue 2 does prove rewarding down the back stretch, and fans of Harvest Moon and similar games probably won’t have as much of a problem with the early going. This is a game that expects you to pay your dues, though, and most players will probably find that too high a price.

Article by: D. F. Smith