Lost In Blue
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Tags: Lost In Blue Categories: Reviews
Posted by Brad on Oct 24th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Lost In Blue (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Role-Playing | No | ||
Games can be educational. I, for one, learned by playing Konami’s Lost in Blue for the Nintendo DS, that I am in no way suited for survival on a desert island, and, if not dead by dehydration the moment I washed up on shore, certainly drowned in my attempts to get water from the nearby stream without a sippy-cup.
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Lost in Blue asks the question: could you survive? When your High School cruise ship capsizes, you’re left to fend for yourself and Skye, a mostly blind female companion, on a tropical isle. This isn’t an island in the vein of ABC’s Lost, however. You’re not haunted by polar bears and crazy monsters. Rather, you’ve got to deal with the more real, more immediate threat to your well-being: finding food.
A good portion of this game – perhaps too much – is dedicated to the dreary task of keeping yourself fed. As you explore your new island home, you will forage for fruit, vegetable, and fungus all around, and hunt animals using tools constructed from plants, sticks, and rocks. There are three main indicators of your health when it comes to survival, displayed on the top screen of the DS system, corresponding to how hungry, thirsty, or tired you are. As you might expect, you keep these gauges full by eating, drinking, and resting. Run any of these down too low, and a fourth measure, that of your overall health, slowly ticks away until death.
I need to say this about the death in Lost in Blue: it is probably the most visceral death experience I have had in a video game. You can take your violent gory killing sprees or your San Andreas shootouts, but I have never felt the emotional connection to the death of my character any deeper than I did in Lost in Blue. I attribute this to one thing: it is a lingering, foreseeable, preventable demise. As your health bar drains down the silhouette version of yourself on that top screen; as your character slows to a crawl, gasping out about how they’re so thirsty that they can’t even swallow that one mushroom you miraculously stumbled across; as he tells you outright that he’s going to die and you have to come to grips with the fact that it’s your fault, that you didn’t ration correctly or search hard enough; it can be severely disturbing.
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And here’s the kicker: that’s in the first ten minutes of the game. The initial struggle for survival, before the availability of a ready food source in the form of Skye’s cooking abilities or a nearby supply of fresh water, creates an immediate sense of danger. The difficulty curve of the game is flipped, with the hardest, most tense portion happening at the very beginning.
Once you get a little further into the game, develop a few tools by exploring your surroundings, and get a steady supply of food going, it tones down a bit and lets you check out the island. Food never becomes a non-issue, of course, and you often find yourself becoming bogged down with the task of returning to the cave to bring your fresh kills to Skye when you’d really rather be off getting the lay of the land. It’s a nod to the realism of survival, but it also means that you’ll have to hike back and forth between the beach and the hills along the same paths over and over and over again, a bit of video-game tedium. There are shortcuts to be found, but they’re too few and far-between to relieve the doldrums of travel.
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Some of your exploratory quests require the aid of your companion, and you’ll have to take blind Skye by the hand and lead her over rock and log to some roadblock you can’t tackle yourself. Then, with that one task accomplished, you’ll need to lead her back to the cave and safety before venturing much further. It wouldn’t do to leave her to starve on a hillside, after all. It does feel at times like the travel is just padding to lengthen the game out to ten or twelve hours.
That’s not to say the game is over after the first play. A second mode unlocks once you beat the game, where you can take the role of Skye and explore a different perspective that is oriented around here role of learning to cook in a cave. It’s no Master Quest, but it’s something to do.
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The use of the DS technology has its good points and bad in Lost in Blue. The touch screen is used in foraging for clams and vegetables buried under sand and earth. Just keep rubbing away the dirt and you’ll have yourself some food. Other times it will have you shaking trees for coconuts or kindling, or using it as a point-and-poke targeting system for spearing fish and bow-hunting animals, neither perfect in their accuracy. That inaccuracy seems almost like an artificial difficulty of the game, trying to keep food-gathering from becoming too easy. All in all, the use of the touch screen is not the most appealing aspect of Lost in Blue, rather a change of pace to make you break out your stylus.
The microphone is used in a couple of instances, the most notable being fire-starting. After you’ve constructed a crude fire-starter of sticks and bark, you rub an ember into existence and then literally blow on that spark through your microphone until it catches and burns. It’s fantastically intuitive, and I found myself performing the act without actually thinking about what I was doing, but once you’ve gone about it a few dozen times, it becomes more of a chore than a game. Thankfully, there is a point in the game at which you construct a box in which to store firewood and, assuming you keep it full, Skye will keep the campfire stoked while you go off on adventures.
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Other inventions come about to spruce up your cave, mostly at Skye’s demand (she’s the one that hangs out there most the time, after all). Beds and chairs make the place more livable, and the addition of shelves and a drum in which to store water make life easier on the girl, letting you go off on longer scouting missions without worry. Again, it is as if the game is upside-down from the traditional game model, getting easier as you go.
Overall, however, Lost in Blue never loses a certain feeling of tedium, and that overshadows its sense of adventure, and the payoff does not quite relieve the work involved in the game’s playing.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Very intuitive in its control. You'll just do what comes naturally. + Well-built tension from the getgo, great emotional connection to characters. + Fun second-play cooking game. |
7.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Can become tedious - sometimes feels more like work than a game. - Touch screen activities aren't always all that entertaining. - Not enough shortcuts - too much running over the same paths time and again. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| It gets off to a good, tense start, but after a little while you're too busy packing potatoes across an island to be having much fun. | |
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Tags: Lost In Blue
Posted by Brad on Oct 24th, 2005 and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
