| Castaway | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay & Story | Release Date | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Castaway is an action adventure game where you play as a stranded man trying to rescue his dog. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Castaway Review Overview
What is Castaway?
Martin wakes up and finds his spaceship has crash landed on an uncharted island in the galaxy. He looks around the crash site to find all his belongings gone. What’s worse–his beloved dog gets kidnapped! Now you must retrieve all your weapons, dive numerous puzzles scattered across the island, defeat any monster in your path, and reunite with your best friend!
Castaway features:
⚫︎ Classic action adventure mechanics
⚫︎ Roguelike features in Tower Mode
⚫︎ Three unique weapons
⚫︎ Pixel artwork
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Castaway's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
 Switch |
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| Price | $7.99 | ||||||
Castaway Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Simple, Easy-To-Master Gameplay |
Way Too Short Nostalgic Jank Lack of enemy variety |
Castaway Overall Score - 60/100
Mediocrity achieved through an imbalance of content and aesthetics. Castaway is at an unfortunate place where it’ll inevitably be drowned out and forgotten due to a lack of anything noteworthy to remember it aside from its exceedingly short gameplay. Yes, it’s cheap, but so are other much more satisfying and complete games. In a way, it almost feels like it’s a demo being marketed as a complete game.
Castaway Story - 5/10
Despite the complete lack of in-game dialogue, Castaway does have a story. It’s instead delivered through an in-game cutscene at the start and only acts as a prelude to the entire game. There’s also a post-game scene to close it out, but otherwise, what passes as the game’s story is just there for formality’s sake and isn’t relevant to anything else. And that's a big problem considering the obvious implications of the scenario and the greater world at large.
Castaway Gameplay - 6/10
Castaway’s gameplay heavily resembles The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, but with very minor differences. Although the clunkiness of the old action adventure format was also carried over, the result is still overall fun and engaging, at least for the first thirty minutes. After that, it just becomes any other action adventure game from the early 21st century explored at a depth no deeper than your ankles. The severe lack of enemy variety doesn’t help its case, either.
Castaway Visuals - 6/10
Castaway uses very nice and vibrant pixel art that just pops from the screen. Unfortunately, games with excellent pixel arts are a dime a dozen nowadays. And Castaway’s artworks, pretty as they may be, lack the personality essential to make them endearing. It even has to resort to reusing artworks and sprites just to be able to fill certain areas and cutscenes.
Castaway Audio - 7/10
Similar to the game’s story, Castaway’s audio merely exists as a formality. However, unlike the former, the audio is presented much, much better and actually does its job of making the experience more engaging. But, just like the list of enemies, there’s a severe lack of variety to them. It’s not even an exaggeration to say that by the time you’ve played for fifteen minutes, you’ve probably already heard of everything the game has to offer.
Castaway Value for Money - 6/10
While the lack of a vast world to explore and the use of a strictly linear game progression model are fine for such a cheap game, the fact that you can essentially complete the entire main quest in around half an hour is questionable at best. The addition of a speedrun mode and a higher difficulty doesn’t even add any real replayability, considering the game’s general lack of content. In a way, its value for money is only somewhat salvaged by the existence of Tower Mode, which itself isn’t very entertaining to play after a while.
Castaway Review: It's Pretty (Mediocre)
Before we begin, if you expected a game adaptation of Tom Hanks’ hit 2000 movie Castaway, like I did when I first read the game’s title, then you came to the wrong place. Castaway is an action-adventure game, where the protagonist must wage war against the local wildlife to rescue his dog from the clutches of… pterodactyls?
No, I’m not making things up. That is literally what happens at the beginning, just after you wake up in the same predicament Tom Hanks’ character found himself in, in the movie I mentioned that shares its name with this game.
For some reason, those dinosaurs also took your pickaxe and grappling hook. They conveniently leave your sword alone, though. Bless their kind hearts. But their action begs a few questions:
Are they oversized crows stealing shiny objects off the ground? Do they have any part in the game’s story at all? Will they serve as the final boss? Can the protagonist sue them for stealing his stuff and kidnapping his dog?
Unfortunately, Castaway’s story likely wasn’t written with the intent of making much sense. In fact, there’s practically no story in the first place. Aside from the opening and ending cutscenes, the game offers nothing else to help weave a world where dinosaurs still roam about and massive ruins in arguably well-kept states exist inside small, isolated islands.
The gameplay fares slightly better, at least. Even though it essentially uses the most basic action adventure mechanics, it’s polished enough such that it doesn’t feel out of place in the year of our Lord 2024.
But that doesn’t mean it’s free of any glaring issues. After all, the game’s emulation of classic mechanics was done so well that even its problems were carried over. For example, all actions in the game are still restricted to the vertical and horizontal directions despite supporting diagonal movement. This disconnect can easily result in multiple missed attacks and opportunities which can snowball to an eventual premature game over screen.
Considering the severe lack of enemy variety in the game (there’s like two. The others are just recolors, armored ones, or resizes), losing can feel much more frustrating than usual. On top of that, since the game’s main method of increasing difficulty is by throwing more enemies behind more obstacles at you, the challenge feels artificial and dissatisfying.
The game also only takes around thirty minutes to complete. Yes, that’s right. It’s short enough that I thought I was playing the demo when I saw the final cutscene start to play. But, it’s neither a demo nor a leaked build. Half an hour is enough to experience the entirety of the main campaign minus the postgame.
Said postgame, the Tower Mode and its roguelike features, doesn’t even do much to alleviate the problem. Every floor is exactly the same and the only variance you’ll encounter as you go through it are the upgrades you can obtain as you level up.
It is incredibly difficult to recommend Castaway to anybody. It’s not good as my review has plainly made apparent, but it’s not that bad either. The gameplay is decent, and the audiovisuals are pretty good regardless of the recycling. But that’s exactly why it’s a hard sell. Good games have an audience, and a lot of bad games do as well. Mediocre ones, on the other hand, are almost always fated to fade in obscurity.
Pros of Castaway
| Things Castaway Got Right |
|---|
|
Simple, Easy-To-Master Gameplay |
Simple, Easy-To-Master Gameplay
Castaway’s main combat loop is as simple as it gets. Dungeon runs essentially boil down to a cycle of entering new areas, defeating every enemy, collecting the key, and battling the boss. To aid you in your quest to oppress the local wildlife, the game provides you with a sword, a pickaxe, and a grappling hook. That’s it. None of them interact with each other, too, so their usage is very straightforward.
Despite the lack of tutorials, you can master their usage within minutes unless you suffer from significant short-term memory issues.
Cons of Castaway
| Things That Castaway Can Improve |
|---|
|
Way Too Short Nostalgic Jank Lack of enemy variety |
Way Too Short
Castaway has a pretty cheap price tag of $7.99. However, there are a huge number of games with roughly the same price that offer far more than this one does. This not only encompasses content, but also gameplay and assets in general.
No, the Tower Mode doesn’t count. Even if it had a thousand floors, the game simply doesn’t have the tools and features necessary to maintain the fun after a couple of hours. I mean, it doesn't even have random floor layouts.
Nostalgic Jank
Emulating the action adventure games of old is fine and all, but did they really have to bring its issues over as well? Like, I’m pretty sure we can do away with the lack of diagonal attacks and tiny corners clipping our actions, right? I mean, they even gave us back the nostalgic, shallow puzzles that barely take a second to solve in your head.
Lack of Enemy Variety
If you remove all the resized or recolored enemies, as well as the bosses, Castaway has a grand total of only two unique enemies throughout the roughly thirty minutes it takes to complete the main campaign. That’s just two more than zero we’re talking about; an insanely small number that begs the question of whether the island’s biodiversity is in severe decline or if it’s just magic.
Even if you include all the enemies previously excluded, practically none of them requires a different approach to defeat, except for one with a rock on its head. As you can imagine, that means there’s not much to the game’s combat. It’s just a matter of facing a growing number of them as you progress.
Is Castaway Worth It?
Not really, no.
Just like many things in life, the most memorable things are either the good or the bad. For example, it’s easy enough to remember the day you graduated from high school or earned an award, right? Similarly, the release of The Day Before and the accompanying beatdown it got from the internet is a legend that will be remembered for a long time. On the other hand, it’s quite difficult to recall what flavor of instant noodles you had just a week prior if that’s all you really eat at dinner.
Castaway is in that dangerous place. It’s neither good enough to earn any fond recollections in the future, nor is it bad enough to remember as a good story to tell your friends while you’re drunk. So, unfortunately, I really can’t recommend the game unless you’re looking for a thirty to sixty-minute time sink.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
PlayStation |
Xbox |
Switch |
||||
| Price | $7.99 | ||||||
Castaway FAQ
Does Castaway have voice acting?
Castaway does not have voice acting. That’s quite a shame considering I was looking forward to the protagonist being voiced by Tom Hanks.
How long does it take to beat Castaway?
Castaway’s main campaign can be finished in around half an hour. There may be differences depending on how much you want to explore, but the game is generally linear in nature.
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Castaway Product Information
 | |
| Title | CASTAWAY |
|---|---|
| Release Date | August 16, 2024 |
| Developer | Canari Games |
| Publisher | Canari Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC(Steam), PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Action, Adventure, Puzzle |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| Rating | ESRB E |
| Official Website | Castaway Official Website |
