// View: Lost in Blue 3 (NintendoDS)

I’ve had a massively one-sided love/hate relationship with the Lost In Blue (formerly Survival Kids) series. I love them, they hate me. /Really/ hate me. I picked up the first instalment with huge anticipation – the idea of being stranded, apparently alone, on a desert island, with nothing to aid me but my own wits. Man against the elements. It appealed to the romantic in me – the idea that I /could/make a fist of survival if I had to, that I, as Man, could rise up as lord of my destiny and tame the unknown wilds of this mysterious island.

But it broke my heart. Turns out I would utterly hopeless at survival, primarily because I would be unable to stay awake for more than 5 hours at a time without eating and drinking constantly, but also because this constant need for nourishment of any kind would force me to feast on poisonous fungus. As you would.

Food was scarce, and what you did find was barely enough to keep you full for the next 10 minutes, let alone the long days of desperate foraging that lay ahead. All this, and we haven’t even mentioned your impossibly idiotic accomplice, Skye. Skye…even writing the name makes the bile rise (WHY WON’T YOU CLIMB THE ROCK, BITCH? WHY?!). I abandoned the series despite knowing that gamers far more patient and forgiving than I were reaping the fruits of their endeavour. I didn’t care. There was a half-decent game there, but to my shame I just couldn’t’ get through the needlessly irritation of it’s first hours. Thinking things have changed in the first sequel, I took a second bite of the cherry – only to find it just as bitter as the first. Lost In Blue 3 seems to have taken this vein of criticism to heart. As a result the game has been streamlined, tasks simplified and the whole business of surviving a whole lot more enjoyable. You can finally spend days actually /discovering/, feeling out your new home at your leisure – the food supply is far more bountiful than you’d be used to from a LiB title, and what food you do collect is far more nourishing, facilitating longer exploratory trips and easing the demands forced upon you by your cave-mate. Veterans of the series will be all too used to the idiocy demonstrated by companion NPC’s, and little is done here to change things. They’ll still happily spend hours sat motionless on a pile of hay, dehydrating and starving themselves to death because you’ve either neglected to hand-hold them to the fresh water supply /20 yards away/ or fill their bellies before you get busy ensuring their survival for another day (It really is ridiculous that three games into the series AI is yet to be tweaked) . The breathtaking level of ignorance on show means any survival help the game can offer you is warmly received.

Once you’ve learnt to bear living with a gibbering idiot, the island itself can take centre stage. It’s an oddly pleasant to the eye, if a little…angular. The jungle is full of sharp edges, the sea set along precise lines (though timing your beach expeditions to avoid the tides is, as always, a nice touch) and right angle pathways through the overgrowth all conspire to rather spoil the desert island illusion. The ‘talking to a chimp’ mini-game doesn’t help believability, either. Frankly though, the idea of chimp-chat isn’t so ridiculous when you factor in the inhumanly stupid behaviour of your allies (case in point: having spent days gathering materials to bridge a valley, you complete it as a ‘team’. Eyeballing lights in the distance, your colleague decides that she’s too tired to check out the mysterious inhabitant of a deserted island, and promptly forces you to return to your cave.)

All this aside, I can say one thing about Lost in Blue 3 that I’d have thought impossible after the first couple: it’s actually quite…fun. It’s certainly the most accessible of the LiB series – the benefits of which certainly being a point of debate.   There was a certain charm to the previous instalments, a sense of defiance sorely missing in this age of mass market video gaming. Lost in Blue 3 maybe loses some of it’s outsider charm, but as an ‘entry-level’ chapter in the island survivor mini-genre (micro-genre?) it’s well worth your time, especially if it leads you to try the rest of the series.