So I’m sitting here at work, at a desk in a warehouse in New York City, where I just took an extended lunch break that wasn’t so much spent eating lunch as playing Lost In Blue 2 for the Nintendo DS.

The game found its way into my dirty little hands a short while before the official release date. It’s not so much that I have deep rooted connections in the video game industry, dodging journalistic embargo dates like a man with a mission to spread the gospel of good games. I’m just a guy in New York City who just happens to frequent an underground game store here or there, game stores that don’t mind hooking a guy up with an early copies of of a game or two, as long as that guy is the type of guy who already stops by a few times a week to sink what’s left of his pitiful paycheck into reasonably priced imports.

I. . . feel like I’m projecting there, a bit, about that paycheck. I did say I was at work. Anyway.

So! Lost In Blue 2! I’ve checked GameRankings where, at the time of this writing, one review has been collected. It was from GamePro, a site so goddamned ridiculous in an unentertaining sort of way, I won’t even bother making a link of it here. The score was a 1.5 out of 5. The author’s byline says, and I’m not making this up, “Hamster4Sale”. I don’t know. Call me crazy, but I have a tough time looking for thoughtful games critique by a guy who signs his articles “Hamster4Sale”.

Not that you should look for thoughtful games critique here either. This is just a blog post. But there’s some content in there somewhere.

So how about some first impressions? I mean, at the very least, I can jump on the main problem our hamster-selling friend had with Lost In Blue 2; this game is pretty hard. Or maybe that is to say, it’s got a steep learning curve. For those who haven’t been keeping up on their gaming news, or maybe didn’t get a chance to play the advanced demo at the New York Comic-Con this year, I’ll try to break it down for you.

Lost In Blue 2 starts off with a shipwreck. Your ship. Or the ship you’re on. It doesn’t really matter who owns it, the point is, the pretty boat sinks, and after a few cutscenes you wash up on the beach of a deserted tropical island (is there any other kind?). Walk a few steps and you’re greeted with another cutscene. You meet a girl who was also on the same boat. She just so happens to be a senior in high school. Hey, that’s your age too! What. . . what are the odds?

I bet she’s single. I’m still early in the game, but I’ve got a hunch. As an aside, I’d love a game where I was trapped on a tropical island with a beautiful woman my age, only to be told halfway through the game, “I’m sorry, I already have a boyfriend.”

Anyway, so you’re there, she’s there, and then you’ve got to. . . survive. That’s what this game is about. Lost In Blue 2 is a survival game. I hear the first Lost In Blue was too, but I never played that myself, so I can’t really say much about it.

“Survival” is represented by three meters on the top screen of the DS, telling you each character’s hunger, thirst, and stamina. The percentages shown over these icons decrease with time, until you can barely see that coconut you were attempting to eat because it’s covered by the constant word-bubbles from your character saying, “She is starving!” “She is thirsty!” “You are worn out!”. This isn’t really a complaint, it’s just how the game works. When one of your survival meters bottom out at 0%, you start to lose HP. If more than one bottom out at the same time (stamina and thirst, or hunger and stamina, or, god-forbid, all three), your HP falls faster. If either character’s HP reaches 0%, you’ll be back at the title screen in no time, forced to watch the same prolonged boat-sinking cut-scene over again, unless you were smart enough to hit the quicksave button before realizing you don’t know how to start a goddamned fire.

I. . . wasn’t so lucky.

Notice, back in that last paragraph, I didn’t write, “The percentages shown over these icons decrease slowly over time.” There’s nothing slow about how fast your stamina, hunger, and thirst gauges fall. In fact, it’s obscene. As a person who gets very hungry on a daily basis here in New York City, well hell, it’s kind of patronizing. Someone who can’t deal with eating less than 17 meals a day while shipwrecked on a deserted island doesn’t deserve to escape. Though I’ll be damned if that’s gonna stop me from trying on their behalf.

That’s because I’m really not bitching about Lost In Blue 2. I like this game. I like that, within 10 minutes of turning the game on for the first time, I was sending a text message to my girl saying, “Both my characters just starved to death. Or dehydrated. Or something. It’s a goddamned toss-up with these bastards.” I couldn’t figure out how to make a fire. I figured there was some sort of flint involved, but I was wrong. The instruction manual, which the same girlfriend is always telling me to actually start reading (I know, I know, I should), wasn’t very helpful. It tells you how to walk, run, and maybe dig around in the sand for clams or other edible things. The rest is basically up to you.

So what I’m trying to say is, Lost In Blue 2 seems to be a game for people who like steep learning curves. I’m that kind of person. I mean, I feel like I get it. The game is trying to tell me there is no goddamned instruction manual for being lost on a deserted island. I’ve been playing the game the same way I’d play out that sort of situation in real life; make it up as I go along, and try to assume what the next step would be through some measure of common sense.

After finally building a fire and grasping the basics of harvesting food and water, the game became a hellish sort of juggling act. While you’re running down to the stream to fill up a bottle of water for the girl who is sick in the cave (after you cooked up some bad mushrooms for lunch), you have to be aware that your own food level is decreasing as well. And so is your stamina, from all that running. Maybe you could walk a bit to conserve energy, but take too much time, and she’s going to start losing HP. And once you get back with that water, and you’re both all nice and hydrated, you think maybe you’ll rest for a minute to recharge your stamina, only to find that doing so makes you use up all the water you just drank, as well as whatever menial food credit you got for those bad mushrooms. For the first few hours of play (almost a week in game-time), I don’t think I managed to bring a single character’s food level above 20%, not even once.

But you get the hang of it. Soon you’re looking for fire wood one day, and maybe you have the gall to explore a little further out there on the island, and you find a stick that’s a little different from the other sticks you’ve been using to build fires. You sharpen that stick and are surprised to find it makes a hell of a spear for fishing. So after a week of being stranded on a desert island, you get to lay off your steady diet of roasted seaweed and coconuts, and get some grouper up in you. You may notice your hunger level has improved dramatically. And maybe you found a bottle to keep some spare water in, and this makes you feel a little bolder, and you wander a little further away from your home base (a cave) on the island. Soon you’ll be finding better food, and more tools, and maybe you can start to think of a way to get off this island, instead of worrying about what you’re going to eat or drink all the time. Maybe, you’ll finally think of a way to ask that girl if, when you get off the island, she might just want to go out and get a real dinner with you sometime.

Or maybe just find out if she already has a boyfriend.

But, hell, it’s still pretty early in the game for me. Maybe something about it will drive me crazy later on. For now, it’s been worth the $30. I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about an overpriced 360 or PS3 game here. It’s the DS. You can afford to take a little risk here and there on a strange sort of game that seems kind of interesting.

The graphics aren’t bad to look at. They can even be downright pretty here and there. The controls and menu options are pretty intuitive. The concept is lovely. And the minigames, which make up most of the “action”, are pretty entertaining; I never feel annoyed at spending a few seconds digging around in the sand with the stylus to find that freshwater clam, instead of just pressing a single button, a la Animal Crossing. Spear-fishing is a pretty fun way to earn your meals, and you’ll probably feel kind of hardcore when you get the hang of it and start picking off grouper with lighting-fast reflexes, and start bragging to your girlfriend who lets you know, as politely as she can, that she really doesn’t care because she’s busy playing her new copy of Cooking Mama for the Nintendo Wii. Having to play the fire-starting minigame each time you want to cook or sleep, well, it makes you feel, if only just a little bit, like you had to earn that meal.

And that’s what it’s about — feeling like you’ve had to earn what you get out of the game. You have to work your ass off just to enjoy the privilege of being able to explore the island a bit. You could say it’s the yin to Grand Theft Auto‘s yang. Grand Theft Auto rewards you for simply buying the game. It rewards you for being a person who loves the sheer act of playing video games. Getting a fast car requires no more effort than standing in an intersection and looking for something fancy, then pressing the “Jack Car” button. And god knows, I love me some GTA. GTA and I have had some very tender moments together, over the years.

But, while GTA is about thanking the player for being a person who plays video games, by giving them a game where they’re entitled to do anything they want at any given time because it’s a video game, Lost In Blue 2 is about teaching the player that every decision they make comes at a cost, even in a video game. If you’re not ready to understand the cost of each action you make, of every step you take further away from your home cave or the freshwater river, well, you’ll find yourself back on your ass at the title screen in no time, without even a simple “Game Over” for your efforts.

So I guess what I’m saying is that Lost In Blue 2 may be your kind of game, if you like the kind of game that can make you frustrated and tired and feeling like you really need a cigarette after you finally make it through another day. It’s like watching an episode of ER, based on the two or three episodes of ER I’ve actually watched; afterwards, you feel like you just got off work yourself. Some of us really like that in games. Games that make us angry. Games that make us feel like we’re failing because we, as players, aren’t doing our jobs properly, not because poor design cheated us out of anything. Games that make us think about each action we take, before we take it.

So far, Lost In Blue 2 isn’t a shining example of all these ideals, but hell, it’s a start.

Shock Value, based on, you know, a few hours of play. . . B-.