There I sat, head rested glumly on my arms as I stared bleakly at a rather depressing ‘Game Over’ screen floating across the second screen of my DS Lite. ‘A whole day’, I murmured to myself. ‘A whole bloody day of progress, and for what?’ It’s not often that failing at a game reduces me to a crumpled heap of depression with a mind to gently close my DS and then propel it as far as I can out of my living room window and under the wheels of a passing truck, but Lost in Blue 2 has the distinct honour of eliciting that very feeling from me half a dozen times whilst playing through it.

It’s not that it’s the worst game of all time, in all honesty. In fact, I could venture that the last four or so times I was left with my head in my hands and a whole chunk of progress to redo were entirely my fault. As a game that relies on strict planning and careful management, Lost in Blue 2 is harshly unforgiving and will come back to bite you in the rear end if you try to nibble on more than you can chew. Released as a sequel to last year’s Lost in Blue (as you may have guessed), the game sees you take control of either a boy or a girl left marooned on a desert island with a member of the opposite sex after a rather unfortunate boat sinking episode.

Now, this is properly lost. We’re not talking about turning round after a couple of minutes spent on holiday in a small French market town at the age of seven to find out that your entire family had upped and strolled off without noticing you’d been left behind (hello Mum and Dad!): this is the full caboodle. No one knows you’ve been left stranded, and with minimal supplies (er… a bottle of water, come to think of it) and two very fragile lives to take care of, you’re left with the task of scouting out the island for food, water and general home-making equipment.

This is the point during which a game will usually give you a few nudges in the right direction, setting you up for what in reality is a very tough task. As anyone who played the teeth-grinding original will have been slightly dreading, the sequel is as unwilling to provide an idea of the basics as before, with hints restricted to the rather obvious tasks such as picking things up and placing them in your rucksack. Whilst this lack of information could possibly be seen as a rather stark reminder that a) your characters actually have very little idea of what they’re doing and b) you’re up the creek with a leaking boat, no paddle and an angry grizzly bear sitting in front of you, it does seem rather silly that any game should make the first few hours the most difficult. We’re not talking learning curve here folks, we’re talking learning wall.

Hence, it’s very likely that within your first few tentative steps around the game’s commendably large island you will push your character too far and end up as worm food. Both yourself and your partner have three health bars that need to be attended to: energy, hunger and thirst. The latter two of these can be affected by eating various types of food and drinking copious amounts of water, with the frequency and amount of both giving you more energy to play with. Whilst your character is in bountiful supply of these three things their overall health – measured in percent – is kept at a high level whilst you travel around the island, but a bit of walking around and exploring on an empty stomach and with little or no energy will quickly see your overall health start to tick away.

You soon realise that you’re going to need to plan what you’re going to be doing to a good degree, and any thoughts of questing deep into the island and finding all sorts of new and interesting items will fly straight out of the window. Progress is very much a gradual, drip-fed thing throughout the game, and despite the initial frustration it actually becomes rather more rewarding and addictive, with new areas being unveiled and shortcuts being made available to save you future journeying time. Each new area packs in a number of new consumables and materials that you characters can cook or make into new items, and with these new items your lives becomes ever-so-slowly easier.

Now, where the original game really fell down was the bit where it came to your partner being about as useful as a sack of spuds, leaving you not only to etch out some kind of living but also to teach what presumably was an intelligent being that she needed to do such things as drink when she was thirsty, or eat when she was hungry. Does the sequel remedy these problems? Kind of. You now have the ability to inform your partner that you are off out for a bit and that they need to look after themselves. They can also craft things for you should you want to go and do something else, which all helps grease the wheels of survival.

That said, the main problem with the game lies in just how quickly both of you decline into being unwell. Gathering scattered foodstuffs and materials to keep you alive takes up a great deal of energy, and by the time you’ve gotten together a decent meal to keep yourself alive you’re left with only a smidgen of energy left to explore with. The option of allowing your partner to gather and cook food is presented, but whilst any meal you cook tends to be rather nourishing – especially once you find various forms of meats to use – your partner is seemingly completely unable to rustle up anything other than a baked potato or some grilled radishes, which as you’d imagine do about as much good as a cardboard steering wheel.

Having learnt this, you will quickly come to the conclusion that to survive and to give yourself enough energy, the onus of gathering and cooking food will mostly fall on your shoulders, which brings you straight back to the problem of conserving energy to explore. The ideal tactic seems to be spending a couple of days doing little but hunting for food nearby your cave or home and then eating a hearty set of meals in order to prepare yourself for a day of exploration, but even with all the preparation in the world you will find that your character runs out of energy frustratingly quickly and you’ll have to desperately hope that you’re lucky enough to explore an area which opens up a shortcut to quicken future progress.

The problem is summed up beautifully right at the beginning of the game. Just to the right of your initial home is a stepping-stone over a river, with your progress to the other side being blocked by a large boulder that both of your characters need to push in order to move. To get to the stage where you can do this means a painfully long adventure through the island, and even when - after a good couple of dozen days of exploring - you have your route filled with shortcuts and your characters are in tip-top condition, the sheer distance of the journey will make them ill.

Hence, you have to mark out your route and make somewhat of a dash for it, hoping that you make it to the boulder in time so that you both have enough energy to push it into the river and hop across back to your cave. At this point you realise that it’s not actually possible for you to make it unless you have a certain item, and you’re left with little or no option than to sit and watch your characters perish. Now, I am all for the careful planning of a trip and such, but the way in which even a finely-judged journey can wipe your characters out to the point where the next few days have to be spent doing as little as possible for as much nutritional gain turns progress into a rather more turgid affair that it possibly needed to be.

Then there’s the problem that when you get to a new area you won’t know what you’re doing, meaning that you feel that you need to stroll around scouting the area to find out what’s around. However, the way that your health declines so rapidly the game seems to actively discourages this. In some respects it comes down to luck as to whether your journeys actually present much in the way of progress to you at all, with whole avenues of exploration leading to dead ends and an inevitable dash for home before your character coughs their last. It’s as if your characters are sliding down the side of a mountain towards inevitable doom, with every action you do to delay this giving them the merest of footholds until eventually they will reach a small plateau for a while. The odds were always supposed to be stacked against you, but it certainly feels in this case that they are unfairly so.

Eventually, frustration becomes your worst enemy. You will become tired of taking time preparing for a journey, only to then realise when you are on it that you will only have energy and time to explore a painfully small slither of the island. You will become increasingly weary of your characters’ vastly exaggerated digestive systems, and the fact that unless you gather the food and cook the meals yourself you will never recover enough energy to make it very far at all. Having got over the initial clueless stage where death isn’t necessarily your fault, you will find the rest of the game will see your deaths (should they happen) as being your punishment for daring to venture that little bit too far, or to try to find one item too many. Realistic perhaps, but hardly fun. For a game that centres itself upon the exploration and discovery of your surroundings and the inhabitants and materials within, exploration is made far too much of a chore.

Now, games are not always going to be easy. I accept that, and to be quite frank I enjoy difficult challenges. Beating Yiazmat in Final Fantasy 12? Sure. You work your way towards the goal, level your characters for hours and then have a crack at it. Competing to a good level on GTR 2? Fine by me – the hours of practicing eventually pay off, and along the way you have great fun. In both cases you have a goal to work towards, and the games allow you to do it no matter how long it takes. Lost in Blue 2, on the other hand, is difficult not because of what you are doing, but the way it hamstrings you into doing it. You know that you need to explore and forage deeper into the island to make progress and hopefully eventually escape, but at every step the game seems to punish you for making completely innocent mistakes, leaving you wondering if exploration is in fact such a good idea. The issue of coping for a slightly useless companion hasn’t been fixed as much as it could have been from the original, and having to take them to water in order for them to drink or cook every meal for fear of wasting away is an annoying distraction from what you feel you should be doing.

Lost in Blue 2 is not the worst game ever, obviously. The game is packed full of amusing mini games such as cooking and fishing, and the painfully slow progress through proceedings is occasionally made worthwhile by a happening or discovery that brings something new to the table for a while. Graphically it isn’t too shabby either, with the island being presented in colourful 3D. Heck, I really wanted to like the thing, I promise. With a slightly more dependable cohort and a way of allowing you to learn new things and explore more areas in a much more staged, manageable manner the garden would have been really very rosy indeed, but unless you have the patience of a saint you should probably steer well clear. Trust me folks, your DS will thank you for it.