By Dmitri Salcedo on November 2nd, 2005

The balance of work to play in videogames is a recurring problem, as all of us have at one time or another slogged through parts of games that felt more like chores than actual fun. Bad role-playing games often have a high chore component to their combat, while the good ones tend to balance out the work with rewards of story advancement and character progression. Similarly, puzzle games can get repetitive and dull if they are poorly designed, but they can be exciting and rewarding with well-timed gradual increases in difficulty. In short, too many obligations in a game spoil the fun, and unfortunately Konami’s Lost in Blue for the Nintendo DS ends up as a case study in how a game’s ratio of work to play can be critically imbalanced.

Lost in Blue’s premise is a standard shipwreck scenario. You wake up dazed on the shores of a deserted island after a maritime calamity leaves you with no worldly possessions. Immediately, you have to find food, water, and shelter to survive. This is easier said than done, and scrounging for food is especially tough at the beginning of the game. Some food must be caught, and some must be dug out of the ground. You also can find various materials like sticks, logs, and vines lying around on the island’s various areas and use them to make tools like fishing poles. After a short while, you find that a girl has also survived the disaster, and the two of you team up to try to carve out some sort of stable living on the island.

The bulk of the game play is spent looking for sustenance, and various events trigger mini-games that must be completed to do such things as harvest food, fish, and make objects. Some of the games use the DS’s touch pad where others utilize the buttons. As a whole, the games are fairly simple and range from somewhat fun to flat-out boring.

Additionally, a major component of the game is your relationship with the girl who is stranded on the island with you. Due to the fact that her glasses were broken during the ordeal, she is unable to see very well and depends on you for pretty much everything, even to the point where you must lead her around by hand, recalling Ico. You can tell what romantic angle Konami was aiming for here, but the net result of the relationship

Aside from the daily grind of survival, there is an overarching story of discovering the island’s mysteries and hopefully getting off the island itself. However, so much of the game is spent on the daily chore aspect that it makes it difficult to make inroads into the real story of the game. As in the Harvest Moon series, you have many little things to do with little time in which to do them. However, in this game, your project is your very survival, not a farm. Neglect doesn’t lead to weeds and reduced profits but ultimately to both characters’ deaths. It’s hard to ever really feel fully relaxed or in control with the limitations of daylight, thirst, and hunger constantly ticking away at a slow, steady drain. Due to your obligations to return to feed and care for your woman and sleep in shelter, you end up retracing the same routes over and over again, only very gradually extending the reach of your explored area.

Despite appearing on a dual-screened platform that affords a great deal of room to spread out the game’s interface, its operation still feels cramped and clumsy. Switching between status windows on the top screen gets annoying due to the inclusion of a worthless wide-view map that always seems to pop up when you’re actually trying to access something useful. Also, many animations are overlong and end up needlessly extending the time it takes to do simple things like climbing or walking near ledges. On the other hand, Lost in Blue’s 3D environment is fairly graphically competent for the platform, and the understated soundtrack does a decent job of matching its environment.

In actuality, Lost in Blue is the spiritual sequel to Konami’s Survival Kids series that appeared on the original Game Boy. Both titles, only one of which made it out of Japan, were limited in scope by the platform they appeared on but still managed to be engaging games. One especially memorable feature was the way tool creation was handled. Figuring out how to make tools required a bit of lateral thinking, as the player had to experiment with different combinations of pieces of wood, stone, and plants to get results. This process is reversed in Lost in Blue. Now the main character comes up with tool ideas, and it’s up to the player to find materials to build the tool. While this new method probably reduces the frustrating moments of "trying everything" in order to make something, it mutes the feeling of triumph where some combination you envisioned in your head actually turned out to work. Also, a newly added hazard is that tools can now actually break after using them for a while, and it happens too often. This simply adds another burden to the busywork one must complete.

Still, Lost in Blue does have a good deal of charm behind it despite its annoyances, and perhaps a sequel would mend the errors. If someone were really predisposed to this class of chore-based gaming as in Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, perhaps they would find enough to like in Lost in Blue. However, the pace of those games tended to be relaxing and leisurely, with any diligence being mostly optional. Lost in Blue instead requires constant vigilance, where the distracted are rewarded with starvation and peril. It probably takes a patient fan of the chore-based gaming niche to actually enjoy Lost in Blue, but ultimately its problems will try the patience of pretty much every other kind of gamer.