As a kid, when you come across an ancient, tattered map in the attic, what’s the first thing you do? If you answered ‘Go to sea, wreck yourself and then wash up on a desert island on the back of a giant turtle’, then we have a winner!
This is the very simple backstory holding down Survival Kids, a co-op survival game from Konami that’s received a surprise revival on Switch 2. The original was a Game Boy Color game of the same name, which was just rereleased on Nintendo Classics last month, and continued in the noughties by the Lost in Blue trilogy on Nintendo DS.
Survival Kids is a colourful romp across a series of fantastical and magical islands. Either solo or with up to 3 friends, you set about crafting and cooking your way to freedom. Or, at the very least clumsily crashing your boat into every possible island on the way home.
Despite the name, this is more Messing About on an Islands Kids than it is about actual survival. You are functionally immortal, you will never die of starvation and there’s none of the usual inventory or time management that comes with the survival genre. This is very much a survival-lite game, making this a decent co-op option for those new to gaming. It’s also entirely playable solo, but as in real life, it’s quicker to chop a tree down when four people are wildly swinging axes at it.
Near the start of each level you will find a Harmony Stone — the McGuffin that both acts as portable camp as you work your way to higher ground, and drives the limited plot forward. This is a relic from a bygone era; despite each island being a deserted one, it was once home to an ancient race with an impressive command of technology.
Once you set up camp, you begin your hunt for either the elevator to the next strata of the island, or the boat that will get you off the island and onto the next one. The elevator is, naturally, broken so you need to find the missing parts to repair it.
The rub is that as you traverse a given island, you will quickly find your way frequently blocked by gaping chasms or unclimbable walls. Since you are resourceful youngsters, and carry around a pickaxe and an axe, you can fashion functional bridges and climbing nets out of the stuff lying around the island.
The genius here is that since you have to manually carry everything — your pockets are full of pickaxe, remember? — and you can’t do complex tasks like climbing while your hands are full, each island is extremely navigable. That’s not to say they are linear — exploration is rewarded and you frequently have to think outside the box, throwing vines and the like into crafting boxes from across a gap, in order to create the bridge you need to cross. You’ll even come across glyphs that unlock extra outfits and Treasure Stones that increase your island’s star rating.
Escaping the island all hinges on solving the area’s puzzles, which invariably involves building bridges, crafting tools and eating food to get the stamina to rip stuff out of the ground.
These puzzles are usually pretty simple — chop down a tree and add wood to the blue box with the floating recipe above it — but get slightly more complicated as the game progresses. Mostly, they get more frustrating when you come across the ‘ancient’ gun turrets that shoot you into the water, making you lose the thing you’re carrying.
New tools are added along the way in the form of blueprints; find those and drag them back to base to discover the recipe for your tool. Collect the bits you need and you suddenly have a new glider to help traverse the peaks, or a fishing rod that will carry parts up cliffs.
Once you’ve repaired enough elevators and are high enough up the island, you’ll find your ship, minus a few key parts. So now, instead of looking for elevator parts, it’s the same thing but looking for rudders, sails and so on. Find the bits, repair the ship and bring the Harmony Stone aboard.
Island-specific recipes aside, this core gameplay loop doesn’t really change: fix the elevator, pick up your camp and up you go. It’s possibly a little simplistic for some, but ideal for playing with your partner or kids who don’t usually have a controller glued to their hands.
Ultimately, your mission is to get the Harmony Stone off of each island and take it back to an arcane lighthouse that staves off the storm surrounding the archipelago, permitting your eventual escape. If you complete the level fast enough, you’ll be awarded up to three stars, adding to those from looting all three Treasure Stones per island. Get enough stars and you can unlock the final island.