Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked (Wii)

Trying to survive on a deserted island would be a miserable experience where you would find yourself at the mercy of resources that might not even be sufficient for survival. In a survival game though such hard conditions can serve as an interesting challenge with satisfying payoffs as you go from being unsure if you can survive a night to establishing a comfortable living situation in spite of the odds. The balance between adversity and fulfillment in a survival game can be a difficult one to achieve though, and Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked seems to fail in most regards at coming close to it.

In Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked you’ll find yourself trapped on an island after a cruise ship sinks. You find yourself as a young man named Hayden, although beating the game can unlock other characters to undergo their own shipwrecked adventure, and while the game doesn’t tell you that you have 100 days to successfully escape your conditions, it will force an ending if you reach that point. However, 100 days isn’t too tight of a limitation on things, the player working towards specific goals to progress the story, acquire tools that can go towards escaping the situation, and if you want one of the better endings, you’ll need to explore the island and unlock its secrets as well. You aren’t alone on the island though, Hayden not only joined by his monkey pet Hobo but eventually encountering a girl named Lucy who can help out and leads to there being a bit more to the plot than just Hayden trying to get safely home.

Unfortunately, the survival mechanics in Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked are at odds with the world design and how long days are. The most important part of survival is of course keeping your needs met, the mains one being hunger and thirst but related things like your stamina diminish as well if you haven’t slept enough or let the other meters deplete. Foraging for food and finding ways to preserve water is a fine concept for the survival challenge, but the problem is you have two mouths to feed and they get hungry fairly rapidly. Much of your day, even if you’re trying to work towards goals like building shelter or acquiring other necessary resources, will still involve scouring around for fruit that is just laying out on the ground. It appears in the same place and it is often just a matter of picking it up, but the time it inevitably takes to collect it does remove a chunk of available time from your day to do important work elsewhere. Even a day devoted to foraging and making pack lunches to eat another time will perhaps keep you topped off for the next day as well before you’re back into collecting food on the side the whole time.

You can and probably should prepare and cook food in different ways and sometimes you might have an opportunity for something special like eating meat from wild animals, but even when you have more filling food you’ll still find yourself soon needing to turn attention back to picking up fruits off the ground. What makes the process of turning found food into more filling meals more excruciating is Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked applying motion sensing minigames to many of its mundane tasks. At times this can be an acceptable injection of new play like when you take a raft across a river and a few like collecting vines from trees at least have your minigame results tie pretty closely to the resources you gather, but most of the cooking and preparing minigames are too simple to fail but still take some time to engage with. You’ll wave your arm around to fan a boiling stew or chop whatever food you put on the cutting board the same way be it a carrot or berries, but it mostly adds a period of bland play bound to be repeated every in-game night as you try to make the already meager rations go a bit further. Minigames do appear during other tasks like crafting but these are engaged with less often and some like stacking different sized stones in the right place even provide a challenge rather than just being busy work, but tying such shallow interactivity to the most repeated tasks definitely adds another layer of annoyance to how often you need to focus on just keeping Hayden and Lucy from starving.

You can’t really put off their needs or this work either. The knock-on effects of them getting too hungry or thirsty can start to snowball, because if a character’s stamina is too low they start moving at an abysmally slow pace. You can stop and rest wherever you are to restore some of it, but then you’ll rapidly get hungry and thirsty in turn. Similarly, if you didn’t gather enough twigs for your campfire and associated campfire minigame each night, you might get sick which causes characters to stop periodically which can have compounding effect on other needs as well, so you also have to keep the twigs topped off despite spending a good amount of them each night unless you want to be woken up early by getting cold. You are given 10 save files that you certainly should make use of because the snowball effect of a bad day can doom your survival efforts, especially if a heavy storm hits which won’t allow you to head too deep into the island and essentially forces you to sleep the day away, something you might not get to do so easily if you didn’t have enough food and twigs left over or in the immediate area.

Lucy’s needs definitely make her a bothersome weight on your shoulders as keeping both people healthy and happy is a chore that constantly interferes with more interesting work like constructing shelter or exploring new areas. However, she can further be a bit of a burden when it comes to navigating an area in general. Sections of the island are split into different 3D spaces you walk around in either alone or with Lucy, but you also have a very limited inventory in Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked. Hayden’s inventory would probably be filled up with twigs, vital tools, and food if he went out alone, so Lucy proves an invaluable assistant since you can load things off on her like a pack mule. Unfortunately that also comes with the need for her to climb and cross everything you do, and Hayden is too much of a gentleman to trust her to do it on her own despite there never being issue. He will come to a stop after climbing up a ledge to help Lucy up and if he jumps across a small gap he’ll wait to catch Lucy, something that can become absurdly tedious in areas like a series of stones across a pool of water in a cave. You can have her wait in place sometimes, but you can’t leave an area without her either and her extra inventory is too important to stray far away from her in the first place, meaning your already very tightly limited daylight hours will also be filled with watching Hayden and Lucy slowly traverse small ledges.

Already you will have much of your day’s events essentially decided for you because you must constantly keep up the cycle of feeding the fire and your bellies and slowing down traversal through the tedious animations, but at certain stages in your progress from barely surviving castaway to someone with a fairly comfortable shelter and equipment, you’ll also rub up against other annoying limitations. For example, at some point in the adventure you will need Sturdy Sticks for quite a lot of building projects. Some are optional like better shelves, although these can provide extra storage at your base of operations so they can be worth it since the island also has a lot of extra things to find that have barely any uses until you finally learn a specific building recipe. However, a lot of Sturdy Sticks will be needed for plot progress and they are only located in a jungle area that’s a long walk from your base. The walk there is often uneventful, not even too many fruits or twigs to be found until you reach the actual wooded area, so it ends up burning time away. Once you get to the jungle, on a very lucky day the spawning spots may give you two Sturdy Sticks, but sometimes you’ll get one or even none and many resources take a few days to replenish. From the time you require Sturdy Sticks to progress to finally building a base closer to the jungle it will take a minimum of 11 days plus the many other resources needed for vital projects, meaning many days comprise of heading out to the one area with something useful, finding the few items that can help, and then scrounging up the food and twigs so you can do it all again tomorrow.

Far too often the cycle you get stuck in will be heading to an area that takes a while to reach to grab a paltry amount of resources and return back to your base camp to play boring minigames and repeat it all tomorrow. There are some moments of satisfaction when a project is finally done and you know you’re edging ever closer to an ending, but as soon as you get something like a new shelter built you’ll soon get a cutscene laying out the next resource intensive task that will often be more about taking long walks out to find scarce items rather than doing any sort of interesting survival challenge. Food gathering is more about visiting the same reliable food sources so it’s more part of a daily checklist than a trial to overcome and because a lot of optional activities can clash with your pair’s oppressive and rapidly diminishing needs, making a nicer bed or trying to figure out recipes through experimentation ends up hard to justify. Some of the minigames in isolation could be decent and a few only crop up once like an inexplicable bull ride. Eery now and then the tedious island traversal is shortened a smidgen by a shortcut you can set up that cut a few seconds off a still long trek, but no plot element and no completed project can offset the agonizing efforts needed to keep your pair of people satisfied enough to really focus on the few areas that would have worked in a less brutal survival game.

THE VERDICT: Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked saddles the player with two people whose needs are so relentlessly pressing that you can barely spend time doing much besides foraging for the same few vital resources each day. Areas with necessary items for projects and plot progress are spaced out so far that you are deliberately made to go on excursion after excursion to gather only an item or two each day to draw things out further, and when you do try to make food last more you’ll find things even more tedious as you play a minigame each time to do so. Some minigames are suitable challenges or a sound idea for a survival experience, but the game slows down all progress with rapidly depleting meters that can have a snowball effect if ignored and even that flicker of satisfaction from completing a big crafting task will be weighed down by the next one requiring even more days of the same monotonous demanding cycle.

And so, I give Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked for Nintendo Wii…

A TERRIBLE rating. While having the same bits of fruit dropping in the same few spots reliably is a bit immersion breaking for an island survival situation, it’s little consistencies like this that keep Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked from being absolutely miserable. Eventually you will submit yourself to the dull routine of visiting the same few spots for food and twigs on your excursion away from camp to maybe grab one or two useful items, so many parts of the adventure do lose some of their difficulty once you stop fighting this awfully boring way of life. It leads to overexposure to the same few minigames, it means you’ll have to watch Hayden and Lucy do their same few animations for crossing the same ground you’ve crossed tens of times already, and it is often only barely working towards your current project or goal, but while the random elements sometimes screw you over in regards to how many Sturdy Sticks or similar items you can grab at once, the essentials are consistent and even unforgiving moments like the heavy storm have a harbinger in the smaller storm that comes the day before. The story isn’t present or interesting enough to make it worth this unexciting cycle that loses its edge once you stop fighting and learn to accept your days will often be fairly uneventful and you’ll make little progress in the grand scheme of things. Making the two characters a bit more rugged would do a lot to let you focus on the more interesting activities on the island, just having their hunger, thirst, and stamina diminish at a slower rate or even just giving you more time in the game’s very short days would already open up the room for experimentation, exploration, and doing more than the same foraging tasks day in and day out. It would minimize how often you retread the same ground too, but Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked seems intent on making the castaway life miserable without it being because you don’t have what you need to survive comfortably.

It seems whether you’re huddled under a stone outcropping with a fire or living in a stone house with improvised furniture, you’re never be alleviated from a brutally boring routine in Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked. The clock is the true killer here though, wearing the player down too quickly as they try to tend to two characters with life expectancies closer to flies than humans in a harsh situation. You need to do a lot of work to squeeze an ounce of fun out of the action in this survival game, but at least it can become clear fairly early on you’ll need to play in an unentertaining way to live. The question here isn’t whether you’ll survive once you know how badly things can snowball if you break from the routine, it’s whether your interest in the game can survive long enough for you to see any of its endings that aren’t characters dying.