"Lost In Bleurgh"

Being stranded on an island sounds great. You've got the cute polar bears, and the implausibly pretty fellow islanders (apart from the token fat boy). You've got mystery. You've got suspense. You've got the cutie who used to be in Roswell. It's all good. And if the hairy weirdos who live in the woods occasionally turn up and try and steal your young, well, who cares? You've got acres of beach ahead of you, a beautiful ocean rolling away to the horizon, and an even more beautiful cast to keep your eyes happy. Admit it, you really do wish you were there. Unfortunately, Lost In Blue on the Nintendo DS doesn't take it's inspiration from flashback-happy nonsensical television gold Lost, but rather from the actual struggles you're likely to face should you wash up on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere – namely being forced into a crash diet that would leave even supermodels feeling a touch peckish, struggling to keep warm and dry, searching for drinking water, and dying an awful lot. Now honestly, where's the fun in that?

Our tale begins with a young fellow named Keith waking up on a beach. It seems that the boat that Keith was on went a bit Titanic, and Keith believes himself to be the only one to have avoided a watery fate. Surveying his surroundings he discovers that he is alone on an island with no obvious means of escape. This is frankly bad enough, but soon things take a devastating turn for the worse when he meets Skye – an impossibly irritating fellow survivor – and the two young ‘uns are forced to join together in order to begin plotting their escape from the island. However, if they want to leave, they're going to have to learn to work with each other in order to survive island life…

Lost In Blue is a sequel to the cult GBC Survival Kids series (which again saw plucky teenagers surviving against all odds in a hostile environment). It's a daunting game, with the environment throwing up everything it can to ensure that our two survivors don't leave the island alive. With this in mind, it's essential that the two stars of the game be likeable figures, otherwise facing up to all the hardships to come seems unappealing. Unfortunately, Keith and Skye aren't exactly the most charismatic creations to grace the twin screens of the DS. Principle character Keith seems like a nice enough chap, but he is intensely dull – the nearest thing we get to character development is the occasional revelation that the poor lad is getting thirsty, while Skye on the other hand is unbelievably annoying in a chirpy, Valley Girl kinda way. This makes it rather difficult to sympathise with their plight, which in turn makes much of Lost In Blue feel like a bit of a chore.

Initially, though, Lost In Blue seems quite exciting. Finding yourself in control of Keith, the first half an hour sees a quite frantic hunt for food and shelter as the teenager is in quite a bad way when he washes up on the beach. Viewed on the touch-screen from a three-quarters overhead perspective, the island at first seems like a cracking place to explore – there are rock peninsulas jutting out into the ocean that can be navigated in search of rewards, there is a beach complete with coconut trees and buried crustaceans, there are some epic grassy plains and hills which are littered with plants and different types of mushrooms, and the promise of much more to be found on the other side of a raging stream. At first you've no way of knowing what foods will make you ill and what foods are good for you (the types of mushroom that prove poisonous change from game to game, so you can't cheat!), or of knowing what'll happen if you dig at the strange lumps of sand in the beach or shake the trees. There's a real sense of discovery, and it's quite captivating. It's when you get Keith fed, and find the small cave that will go on to become your home while you're on the island, that the excitement starts to fade – you meet up with Skye, and the game settles into a steady monotony.

Once you've ensured that, for now at least, our heroes are out of immediate danger and are settled in to the island, you'll soon discover that the key to success in Lost In Blue is in building up a daily routine that will keep Keith and Skye alive long enough to make their escape, with each game day lasting between ten and twenty minutes. Animal Crossing and the Harvest Moon series (and even the previous Survival Kids games) have shown that it is entirely possible to create an addictive and enjoyable game out of a standard – even repetitive – daily routine, but those games were made enjoyable due to the buckets of charm that they possessed. The harsh realism and dull characters mean that Lost In Blue lacks much of this charm, and as such performing the same daily tasks becomes increasingly tedious as the game progresses. An average day in Keith's life involves building up a fire to keep the cave that he and Skye occupy warm, hunting for firewood, collecting drinking water from the stream, gathering mushrooms and coconuts for food, and later on turning his hand to fishing or hunting to get some more hearty meals made – the status bars on the top screen show Keith and Skye's level of exhaustion, hunger and thirst, and as soon as these start to drop too much Keith must return to the cave in order to rest or eat. This full schedule means that just finding time for exploring the island is a challenge in itself, and even when you do set off on an expedition into the woods, the game is so strict with regards to how much Keith can get away with before he passes out or dies that every venture into the unknown becomes an exercise in frustration, as by the time you reach a new area Keith is ready to drop. As the game progresses you can build proper beds, and eat better meals, and this improves Keith's performance, but it's very slow going.

As dull and tedious as this all is, Lost In Blue somehow manages to be one of the most satisfying games yet to grace the DS. You'll swear and mutter constantly about the slow progress and the occasional lack of any useful items to be found, but then every minor success or achievement becomes a God-like triumph – even just sharpening a stick to use for spear-fishing is a moment of glory so great that you want to announce to anyone within earshot that you are the King of Island Survival. It's rare to find a game that gives you such an immense feeling of achievement, and it has to be said that the reason that Lost In Blue carries it off so well is precisely because it is so strict on you – every time you actually do something right you are rewarded with a genuine sense of pulling through against the odds, which fits in well with the whole ‘survival' theme of the game.

As good as this soaring sense of satisfaction may be, the game is made all the more frustrating by the fact that Skye is clearly the most stupid woman Keith is likely to meet in his life (his increasingly high mortality rate notwithstanding). As the woman, her role in the game is literally to stay home and do the cooking. It's not this cheeky slap on the arse of women's lib that I object to (if anything, I think there should be more sexism in games), but the fact that even with so little to do in the game, Skye manages to ruin everything for Keith. Every time Keith is out and about trying to keep both teens alive, he is constantly berated by what appear to be telepathic messages from the cave-bound wench – she lets him know when she's getting hungry or thirsty (despite the fact that there is a stream of drinking water right outside the cave), and he needs to go and lead her by the hand to the stream. What's worse, she is clearly a pathological liar – after about a week on the island with Keith going to all the trouble of laying a fresh fire every day, Skye announces that if she is left a pile of firewood she can keep the fire going. Duly, I head out and gather up a steady supply of twigs. After I return these to the cave, Skye builds them into a handy pile, before turning and watching motionless as the fire dwindles and goes out. Her face was expressionless and blank, but she was laughing inside, the evil cow. An unlockable mode allows you to play through the game as Skye instead of Keith, but with it's focus on domestic chores, if anything this only confirms that, well, she doesn't really do anything in the game. Aside from moments where she must help you to move heavier rocks and boulders out of the way, she is far more of a burden than anything else.

This frustration and tedium carries on until just after the halfway point, when the tone shifts significantly – upon discovering some ancient ruins deep in the jungle, Lost In Blue takes a severe turn for the Zelda, with a sudden shift towards the standard push-blocks-in-the-right-order style brain-scratchers, and there's a major plot twist that completely and utterly changes the feel of the game. While this completely outclasses the slow monotony of the opening stages of the game, it does feel slightly jarring. Although the new puzzles and such should lead to a faster-paced game, you are still constrained by the over-zealous exhaustion, thirst and hunger meters. This leads to an almost uncomfortable experience – you are aware that events in the game should now be carrying some tension, but the need to rest so often completely negates the gathering pace.

Where Lost In Blue really does shine, though, is in its superb use of the DS' unique features. Everything is literally quite hands on, and it all feels remarkably intuitive. When starting a fire, for example, you must rapidly press the left and right shoulder buttons – each one controlling one hand – in order to rub a stick to get a spark going, and then blow into the microphone in order to really get the fire blazing. That's not all - spear-fishing is accomplished by using the stylus to literally stab the fish that swim at your feet. Digging up vegetables is accomplished by using the stylus to scrape away the soil. Trees are shaken by rubbing them side to side. It's clear that every effort was made to ensure that this game made the best use of the DS possible, and in this respect Lost In Blue is a triumph – thanks to the clever use of the touch-screen control simple actions that should be quite tedious become reasonably fun. The only problem comes in having to tap an item in order to pick it up once it has been fully unearthed – this feels a bit clumsy and unnatural, which is a sad contrast to the otherwise spectacularly intuitive and well thought-out touch control.

The overall presentation in Lost In Blue let's the side down a little. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, really – the sound effects are top notch and the animation is incredibly detailed and smooth – it's just that the realistic approach that Konami opted for is what mostly robs the game of any charm. The character sprites are quite large on screen, and look really quite realistic. Right down to the clothing, both Skye and Keith are very well detailed, and the smooth and fluid movement is genuinely quite impressive – each character boasts a mighty number of animation frames. The environments are similarly well rendered – from the dark and gloomy jungle to some very impressive water effects, and detailed grass, it really does seem like a realistic island environment – aided no end by the backdrop of very believable sound effects. From the soothing babble of the water to the delightful birdsong, the sounds of island life are rendered very well indeed, which is good as (a few brief but rather chipper bursts into song aside) they prove pretty much the only soundtrack to the game. As well done and impressive as this all is, it makes the whole game seem very serious, which when coupled with the harsh and realistic difficulty level and the steady repetitiveness of the daily in-game routine, serves to slowly but steadily sap the sense of fun from the proceedings. It's the bright, colourful and fun look that allows games like Animal Crossing to get away with the fact that nothing really happens, and (apart from in the close-ups of characters' faces during dialogue sequences, which have a nice hand-drawn anime style) Lost In Blue's dedication to realism gives the game a far more serious feel than it can really afford to have given the heavy content.

It's hard to know just how to take Lost In Blue. On the one hand it's a genuinely fantastic concept, and one that should be well suited to portable gaming, but on the other hand it's quite a charmless affair with a dull lead character and an infuriating sidekick. On the one hand it makes great use of the various functions of the DS – better use than quite a few of the games at the moment, but on the other progressing through the game to make use of these features feels like quite a chore at times. On the one hand the presentation is genuinely superb, but on the other this same presentation takes away any sense of fun that the game may have. It's incredibly rewarding when you succeed, but incredibly tedious in between your successes. It throws up a complete change of pace and a truly surprising plot development that really changes the mood and pace, but is so constrained by its punishing mechanics that it inadvertently slows itself right down again. It's an interesting game, and compelling in its own way, but all that really sets it apart right now is the superb use of the DS itself. As more and more developers become just a little more adventurous with the DS and become more willing to innovate, Lost In Blue may well seem far more ordinary in this respect, and when that happens, it's more than likely to be cast away (hah!) in favour of something better.

A bit of a washout.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/20/06