Now I simply have to find them – just a matter of time… Good for various recipies? Of course! Why didn’t I think of it. There is nothing fun about mindlessly going through endless combinations. Because it is not required to find the recipes to solve the game, I conclude that the game designers thought this would be fun to add some well hidden extras. The chance to find a recipe is about 7 million to one – like buying two tickets for the lottery! In his first “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Ernest Adams already criticized puzzles based on pure chance but this is a whole new dimension. Among these, the player is supposed to find 45 recipes. If I remember the stochastics class correctly, there are over 328 million possible combinations. Every dish consists of up to 4 ingredients and up to 2 seasonings. Finding a special recipe is a matter of pure chance and the odds are quite bad: There are 71 different ingredients, 8 seasonings and 6 cooking methods. Here comes the first flaw: the game offers NO CLUE on what ingredients might yield a special recipe. The game keeps track of the recipes you have discovered so the player will feel encouraged to collect them all. It is unclear whether the special recipes are more nutritional then the generated ones, but they certainly feel more desirable. Seasoning Potatoes with salt and pepper results in “Baked Potato”. However, there are certain special combinations of ingredients which yield a special meal with a custom name and illustration. So most of the time, you get Stuff like “Sand Crab Strange Salad”. Normally the game takes names and colors of the ingredients and generates a name and an illustration for the dish. First, the player needs to select the right ingredients, seasoning and the method to prepare the food. The minigame hast two main components, both of which are flawed. Curiously, the design errors I want to discuss seem to be quite common, especially among Japanese developers, which is why I consider a detailed analysis worthwhile. In this last short post about Lost in Blue, I will talk of the cooking minigame embedded into it and how bad it is.

Moby games cooking mama