Survival Kids Review – Nostalgic Franchise Returns With A Twist For A New Generation

One of the most bizarre experiences I’ve ever had in this job was watching the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct a few months ago, and seeing a trailer for a game about kids exploring an island. Literally, my first thought was “is this Survival Kids? After all this time?” and then thinking I must have been wrong when the game clearly showed itself to be a co-op title, something the series has never been before. I was then extra dumbfounded when the words Survival Kids appeared at the end of the trailer – I was simultaneously correct, and confused. Why bring back this franchise for the first time in over a decade? Would this be anything like those previous games?

Survival Kids as a franchise began on the Game Boy Color with a title of the same name, and was a game about a young protagonist who washed up alone on a deserted island and would need to stay alive. I had this game as a kid, and was drawn in by its Pokemon-esque presentation and surprising difficulty (being too young to understand how to cheese it). The sequel never made its way overseas, but the series rebranded to the teen-focused Lost in Blue with its next three entries on the DS, and that’s probably the name American gamers are most familiar with.

One thing that tied all these games together was that they were plot-driven survival games – players were required to manage the health, hunger, and safety of one or more survivors as they explored to discover more about their situations, and this could occasionally be an exercise in frustration – but it did make them rather enticing as mystery-box type titles.

Survival Kids on the Switch 2, on the other hand, could hardly be more different in tone. You play as a group of kid adventurers setting sail to find legendary treasure, only to end up stranded at sea by a storm you need to restore a lighthouse to dissipate. It’s not the worst set-up I’ve seen, but it does already set the game apart right from the jump, as does my most persistent complaint – the game’s narrator.

In order to really dig into my issues, though, I want to start by clearly establishing something I only really figured out during my gameplay. This game is absolutely meant for children, and I might even say young children at that. Seeing a game about survival might lead seasoned players to believe that this is a game about, well, surviving – foraging for food to keep hunger at bay, gathering materials and supplies to arm and comfort yourself, and maybe even facing intimidating threats or crises.

Survival Kids features none of these aspects, and is really more of a cooperative exploration game than anything else. Rather than a single island to explore, the game is split between many individual levels, and these levels are so focused on reaching the end that you are actually timed for a star rating at the end of each. There might be tension about beating the unseen clock, but the goal isn’t to stay safe or alive, it’s just to reach the end of the stage.

The narrator, while you’re doing this, never shuts up any time you accomplish a task, always giving you some kind of cheeky remark about what you’re in the process of doing or what you might need to focus on next, and it wore thin on me extremely quickly. This game definitely thinks it’s funny, and it might be for children, but as an adult I found it annoying.

The narrator plays into the biggest reason that I think this game is mostly intended for children – it is excessively linear. You are always being guided in a specific direction, to do a specific thing. You can customize your character, and you even unlock more options for that as you dig up secret treasures or earn stars, but levels effectively have a very deliberate sequence of events that you won’t ever really break free from. It’s good in the cooperative sense that you can always have a good idea of what you should be doing next, but it’s a little bit frustrating to be railroaded so hard, because if I’m being timed, it just comes across as “how fast can you optimize this exact order of tasks?”

I played the game mostly in co-op mode, but also sampled a level playing by myself, and I am happy to report that the game does account for solo players. Co-op mode encourages teamwork from beginning to end, as it will take you longer to accomplish pretty much anything without your friends helping to focus down tasks. This sounds okay on paper, but it does mean that everything feels like it takes forever to get done if your friends aren’t also doing exactly the same thing in synchronicity. In solo mode, you chop trees and break rocks faster, and items that you’re meant to team-carry in co-op can be solo-carried at the same speed, though I have concerns about the maneuverability still being pretty limited when playing alone and dragging large objects.

The game’s controls can occasionally get frustrating, particularly when carrying items and needing to put them down. Generally the game is responsive, but occasionally I would have to press the drop button multiple times to get my avatar to actually do it, and you’re not always prompted to press the button when you ought to be. This largely gets less frustrating over time as you begin to intuit how the game works, but it was annoying at the start.

I would ultimately describe Survival Kids as being sort of like a co-operative theme park experience in game form. You can team up to accomplish very basic tasks, but you are on a track that you can’t really get off of and you’re always told exactly what you ought to do next. There is some reward to exploring off the beaten path, but these sidequests are never more than a few minutes (at most) of problem-solving in order to find an extra treasure, and then you’re right back on the railroad – after, of course, you agonizingly drag that treasure back to your camp that you have to move constantly.

I do think this game would be a perfectly fun time for kids who are learning problem-solving or even starting to handle their own games, but as adults, myself and my partner were just not particularly entertained outside of the basic fun of playing anything together. There’s a fair amount of content, but it will likely start feeling agonizingly repetitive if you’re old enough to think critically about such things. I think I’d probably retitle this one – call it “Survival for Kids, But Probably Not Anyone Else”.