Lost in Blue - GoNintendo reader review

Time for another of our reader's takes on a game; this time an oldie... how many of you remember Lost in Blue? If not, Freezair takes you through all you need to know. Is it enough to make you want to pick up and/or play it? —cortjezter

Whenever you get a new system, there's always several games you want to get before any others, right? You may have a large list of games you'd like to get, but there are those few that you plan to seek out before all others, right? Well, Lost in Blue was one of mine when I first got a DS. Oddly enough.

Or maybe not so oddly, because Lost in Blue is actually a sequel to an obscure-but-great little game released all the way back on the Game Boy: Survival Kids, an RPG/simulation title that puts you in the shoes of a kid who's just gotten lost on a deserted island. Challenging, but generally fair, that title boasted a wealth of content, a huge game world, fun mini-games, multiple endings, and was generally a well-balanced, compelling little title. Having played through every one of its endings at least twice, I was naturally psyched to play its sequel. And naturally, I was... disappointed. While not without its charms, Lost in Blue is, sadly, not its older brother.

The story of Lost in Blue is the same as in Survival Kids: You're a kid who gets shipwrecked on a deserted island, and you have to survive. When there, you meet another survivor of the shipwreck, and the two of you team up. While in the original game, you got to choose your character, and you didn't meet your partner until late game if at all, in Lost in Blue, you are locked into choosing the male protagonist from the start, and you're saddled with your female companion right off the bat, too. In order to survive on the island, you need to keep track of four stats: Your hunger, thirst, energy, and general health. You must find food and clean water, and safe places to sleep and rest, to manage them. If, in the early stages of the game, you only had to take care of yourself, this would be quite manageable. However, the addition of your "partner" Skye makes this a much taller order than it should be.

Let me describe your in-game relationship with Skye for a moment. Skye is suffering from an injury (a sprained ankle, which you'd think would heal eventually), and is also missing her glasses, which means she has to fumble around like Velma Dinkley to get anything done. She is pretty much helpless, then. This helplessness means that in order to explore the island with her, you have to carry her around by hand, and help her over things. The first thing about this is, she moves ''very slowly.'' Helping her over obstacles takes a long time, too. Carrying her with you takes a long time, meaning it's difficult to get far in your exploration with her around. You'll eventually grow tired when you're not too far from base, and need to rest or sleep. The original Survival Kids provided multiple safe spots to sleep, for your longer journeys, but in Lost in Blue, only your "home base," a cave, is available to you. You'll need to turn back early in the day, even though you need Skye with you to pass certain puzzles and situations. Either that, or rest in the open--which isn't as good as sleeping in your cave--and suffer from serious stat drain.

Why not just leave Skye all by herself and explore, then? There's the other problem with Skye: Her AI isn't very good. It's just not feasible to leave her by herself for a long time. She is, bizarrely, very bad at taking care of herself. It's difficult to figure out how to give her food without her deciding to use it to cook for you (her special, indispensable skill is... cooking), and even when you do leave her food and water, she seems very loathe to actually eat and drink them. Even though there's a river not fifty feet from your cave, she won't leave it to drink from the river; you have to collect bottles to fill up a water barrel first. This isn't the only thing that she doesn't seem to be good at taking care of. Midway through the game, it becomes possible to capture certain animals, like chickens and goats, to keep for the eggs and milk. Skye, if left at home, is supposed to take care of them. But I've had an awful lot of chickens die under her watch.

It's a shame Skye is such a load, because the rest of the game isn't too bad, really. The island is quite large, and though hard to explore WITH her, without her, it's much more feasible to explore in one or two days. It overfloweth with all kinds of different items, and finding out how you can use them all is neat. The game even provides a helpful encyclopedia of everything you've found and done. You can make items to help you in your survival, like spears, bows, and fishing rods, and there's many different varieties of each depending on the materials you use: Plain old sticks may be more plentiful, but if you go out of your way to find bamboo (and it is REALLY going out of your way, let me tell you) it will serve you very well. Inventory space is limited, so you have to pick and choose what you take well. The management aspects do not feel quite as nicely balanced as in Survival Kids, admittedly, but they're still not badly done.

There are small mini-games for a number of tasks, like fishing and digging for clams or vegetables. This is an earlier DS game, so, naturally, this uses the touch screen. The touch-screen games are admittedly pretty simplistic, and can get repetitive, but they aren't completely terrible. A few of the mini-games (such as the one for fishing) are actually pretty decent, though most never rise above the level of "drag the wriggly thing back to your bag." Overall, they do their job, but they're not particularly interesting.

There's a number of things that set out to make this game more difficult than the original Survival Kids, which was already a pretty challenging game. For one thing, the mysterious mushrooms you encounter throughout the game--some have good effects, and some have bad ones, but the original game kept a record of which was which after you chowed down on them. Not so with this game, so if you can't remember after having not played the game for five months, too bad for you! Also, meat (the heartiest food you can find) is hard as heck to come by in this version, even though fish: Fishing items see a lot of use, so even if they're made of flexible bamboo, they break easily. You can catch a few small things like squirrels in traps, but they don't provide much food. And unlike in the original, where you could build a fire anywhere and cook on the go, in this version, you can only build fires in your cave at home and only Skye can cook. (And she's not very good to start off with.) Admittedly, when you beat the game for the first time and unlock Skye's "story," as it were, the cooking mini-game is kind of fun. It lets you throw things together in random combinations, sort of like if Cooking Mama had a "free-for-all" mode. And there's a number of ways you can reach that game-beating, since, like the original, there are multiple endings. It's even a bit longer, since while the original automatically ends after 100 days, this one gives you a full year (365 in-game days) to either escape, or establish yourself sufficiently on the island that you're OK with not really escaping.

So a lot of individual parts of this game aren't so bad. It's mainly that darn Skye holding things back by being dumb and helpless as a post. Her helplessness is a pretty huge detriment, though, and holds the game back a lot and makes it way more frustrating than it needs to be. Exploring the island, finding new items, and the fun of discovery are just enough for me to rate this one a 6--on the "plain but decently enjoyable" side of mediocre. It's a bit of a shame, though. Not all sequels can be a huge improvement on the original, I guess.

My Score: 6