Picture the scene: you've woken up early and spent the morning sprucing yourself up to look your very best for an important meeting. You've done everything you can and gathered everything you need - you're as ready as you'll ever be. There's time for a cup of coffee and a quick browse through your RSS feeds before you leave, but you're still on schedule; a few minutes early, even. You get to the car feeling pretty good about yourself, all things considered, and fish through your pockets for the keys. But they're gone!

We've all suffered through such nightmarish moments; whether it's lost car keys threatening to derail your day or a remote control missing in action, minor inconveniences have a canny way of picking the perfect moment to strike. There's an urgent email that you need to reply to before close of business, but suddenly the same password you've been using for the last decade doesn't work. At such times, you need Sumio Mondo. He's a searcher; a finder of lost things. For a small fee, he'll come to your place of work and turn the caps lock on your keyboard off. Sumio's such a swell guy that he'll even look between the sofa cushions for your DVR remote! Ably aided in his endeavours by Catherine, a know-it-all sidekick that's no less indispensable for being a computer, together they're the perfect team.

The story is all rather farcical, but knowingly so, and while the first few minutes of Flower, Sun and Rain are affected enough to put potential players off, give Rising Star Games' DS reworking of Grasshopper Manufacture's PS2 debut a fair shake, because a warm light soon shines through the ill-advised abstraction: the trademark charm of cult Japanese game-maker Goichi Suda. The game isn't for everyone, though, and relatively speaking it mightn't be for anyone - certainly it wasn't for this critic and I get the impression that I've enjoyed Flower, Sun and Rain rather more than most. Still, there are a select few out there - dedicated subjects of the great Suda 51, wrestling and football fanatics, the clinically deranged - who will love it unreservedly and without restraint; very much in the same sense, you suspect, its idiosyncratic creator went about realising his distinct vision. For those of us left behind, a range of issues, not least the tiresome mechanics of its moment-to-moment gameplay, prove problematic enough to make the eight hours of Flower, Sun and Rain an opportunity missed; a memorably madcap experience that's unfortunately marred by a mess of frustrating design choices. And on the DS, it's not even a pretty mess.

The narrative has Sumio and his trusty companion dispatched at the outset to Lospass Island, where Edo, the manager of the titular hotel, has requested their searcher-services. In true Grasshopper fashion, of course, it takes a while to discern as much; that, or an adventure through the game manual - otherwise, what Flower, Sun and Rain hopes to pass off as story only comes together only after you've suffered through a few long minutes of abstract MTV animation and an overindulgence of protracted angles of Giggs, Sumio's beloved Toyota Celica, while inexplicable European elevator muzak plays over the sound of waves crashing. Not soon enough, the searcher arrives at the car park where you get your first taste of gameplay. You move Sumio with the d-pad or by scratching directions around a circle on the touch screen, but the implementation of the latter control method is so cack-handed that you're best advised to slide your stylus back into its slot until it's absolutely necessary to retrieve it.

When you navigate Sumio near something of interest, a pulsating ring indicates that you can interact with it. Largely, interaction in Flower, Sun and Rain amounts to either tapping through writer/director Suda's trademark scrolls of self-indulgent dialogue or solving puzzles with your lovely assistant Catherine. The former, if you don't share the game-maker's disparate pop culture fascinations (count wrestling, music, tech and football among the myriad), can be absolute tedium given the non-interactive nature of conversation, while the latter, an answer-for-everything mechanic by which you drive the experience forward baby step by baby step, is so inane in its conception and disconnected in its laboured execution that you might find yourself misremembering a fondness for low-resolution pixel hunting. Whatever your objective, the puzzles are predictable encounters at best; your path is blocked by some inconsiderate citizen who requires your help to locate some lost item and refuses to move until their possession is retrieved. It's no trouble to find NPCs in such need, nor trigger points for story-driven events to occur, because the game funnels you through the environment like a double-wide sailboat along a claustrophobic canal; through the five floors of the luxurious Flower, Sun and Rain Hotel and the rest of the island, you're often given the illusion of freedom but never the reality. In fact, the developers go so far as to refuse you entry to any doors or passages that don't play directly into the particular mystery of the scenario at hand - of which there are eighteen, all named after songs and ranging from a few minutes in duration to an hour or more.

In any case, finding important NPCs or pertinent puzzle paraphernalia isn't the problem. You often find yourself a few steps ahead of Flower, Sun and Rain, in fact, but hindered nevertheless by its insistence that you visit a particular location or jack into Catherine before the opportunity to crack a case opens up. Don't expect the ends of the earth when it finally does, either; this isn't a game that requires you to use logic and deduction so much as trawl through an extensive in-game guidebook for the right numerical code to plug into your automated puzzle-solving computer - and the less said about the indecipherable mess of a mini-game that it insists you preface each such sequence with, the better.

When you're first presented with the mass of patch cables that represent Catherine's jacking interface, Sumio even advises that "there's no real art to this. Just keep going until one fits," as if the arbitrariness that suffuses every aspect of Flower, Sun and Rain were something to be proud of. Suda, at least, seems to positively relish it. While banging on about how only specifically stipulated vehicles can be driven around the island, by way of explaining that you have to spend upwards of fifteen minutes walking from one end to the other in search of some trigger point, another of his madcap cast of characters offers an insincere apology: "I'm sorry. These are the rules." The paint-by-numbers linearity of the game mean that you're never given the opportunity, but should you think of straying from the path, the hotel manager advises that "breaking the rules means punishment by death." One imagines that cannibalism would soon follow, so set is Suda on denying the player any sense of involvement in the experience.

In terms of its gameplay, Flower, Sun and Rain is a disappointment - and did I say already how offensive its graphics are, next to the refined aesthetic of Suda's later, greater efforts? Give it your all and you might divine that Lospass is supposed to be an idyllic haven, the Caribbean island of your dreams, except that it's so very fugly. Complex textures are not among the portable platform's strong suits, but so many of the environments look like cheap soap opera sets that it can be hard at times to tell the wood from the trees, or the doors from the walls. At least it sounds alright; if it's of some comfort, there are a few toe-tapping techno renditions of classic music, along with a range of original Japanese electronica to keep you company during the long walks between locations.

What holds Flower, Sun and Rain together, in the end, is Suda 51's inimitable sense of humour. Much of its dialogue tends towards self-service but the same indulgences that make conversations so monotonous when their subject matter doesn't hit home - when Suda isn't fetishising one niche interest or another - are better brought to bear when applied in broad strokes. The friendly ghost who roams the hotel, putting holes in the manager's underpants and flipping up the maids' skirts, is a particular highlight - and it wouldn't do to overlook Mati the housekeeper, who takes "a broader view on trotting" as opposed to running in the hallways (which is strictly forbidden). The game is peppered, too, with appreciably offbeat winks and tips of the hat to the myriad influences that Suda wears on his sleeve. You could call it Twin Peaks meets Memento meets Hotel Dusk, but the collage of Flower, Sun and Rain sadly never comes close to even equalling the disparate parts from which it takes its cues. While it has its moments, the DS port of this lost chapter of Suda's game-making career is a collage of inferior experiences that can't quite muster a voice of their own, strung together with poorly executed play mechanics and contrivances the likes of which you'll be glad never to set eyes on again.

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).