Survival Kids hands-on preview – the biggest Switch 2 third party exclusive
GameCentral speaks to the makers of Konami's latest reboot: a four-player co-op game that is the most exciting third party exclusive for the Nintendo Switch 2.
No one can complain about the volume of launch games being released alongside the Nintendo Switch 2, but unfortunately they're almost all ports and remasters of existing third party titles. There's only two first party Nintendo games – Mario Kart World and Welcome Tour – and only two exclusive third party titles: this and future racer Fast Fusion, from Fast RMX maker Shin'en. That's a budget-priced indie title though, while this is a reboot of an old Konami franchise that we happen to have been fans of back in the late nineties.
We're not even going to speculate as to why Konami keeps reviving smaller franchises like this, while leaving Castlevania on the shelf, but it's easy enough to see why a four-player co-op game with a family friendly vibe would seem like a good idea for a Switch 2 launch title.
We got to play multiple levels from the game at a preview event last week, and it was a lot of fun. We're not sure it's rather basic visuals were the best idea, since they can seem rather cheap and childish, but this is a solid game with some enjoyably meaty puzzles, that might just end up as the Switch 2's first hidden gem.
Survival Kids was originally released in 1999 for the Game Boy Color, although in Japan and Europe it was called Stranded Kids – for subsequent entries it switched to the name Lost In Blue in the West, the last of which was on the Wii in 2008.
For once, the American name made more sense though, as the original is one of the very first entries in the survival game genre, more than a decade before the concept became more commonplace. As such, you foraged for food to keep you going, while trying to build structures and rafts in order to help you escape the desert island you were stuck on – think a cosy sim like Stardew Valley but with the ability to starve to death.
'We were looking through the back catalogue of Konami titles, looking for games that we thought would be ripe for doing an appropriate reinvention of. And you're absolutely right, the original game, on Game Boy Color, was an almost a template for what we now know as the survival game,' Konami creative director Richard Jones told us.
'It was very open-ended, it was very hard, there was a lot of trial and error – you really did have to bang your head against it, to actually get anywhere. But what we loved about it was the idea of kids on a desert island.
'You look on the cover of the original Game Boy Color game and there was always a boy and a girl, so there was always two kids but you only ever played a single-player game. So, one of the first thoughts was: 'How do we make this into a multiplayer game for modern audiences?''
The new Survival Kids has the same premise as the original, in the sense that it's also a Robinson Crusoe simulator, but it's not a survival game and nobody's going to be dying because they couldn't find enough coconuts. Instead, it's a co-operative puzzle game, with up to four of you stranded on a series of islands (which are actually giant turtles). There's something about collecting Harmony Stones as well, but basically you start off on one island and have to adventure across it to build a raft to get to the next.
You have a little base camp you can build (and pack up to move elsewhere) where you can cook food to give you a stamina boost – which is need to move or dig up some heavier objects – and swap between various items like a fan (for producing wind), an umbrella (for gliding short distances) and a fishing rod (not just for fishing but snagging distant items and switches), whose blueprints you discover along the way.
Raw materials such as wood, stone, and vines have to be mined but this is a trivial task, especially if someone else helps at the same time, to speed things up. Although if you're playing with young kids just bringing resources to the crafting box is useful busywork, that starts to become slightly reminiscent of Overcooked.
These materials are often used to craft climbing nets and bridges, but you soon get onto more complex puzzles, that involve things like controlling platforms to access new areas and neutralising statues that spit projectiles at you. We never got stuck while playing but some of the puzzles did take some brainpower, which is encouraging for adult players.
'That's exactly the balance we were trying to make,' says Jones. 'We wanted the systems to be accessible, so the crafting box where everyone can contribute and throw things in, and then the item pops out. So rather than inventory management and having to go scrabbling around for loads and loads of resources we wanted to make the crafting simple and the stamina bar simple and very understandable.'
'But at the same time, you can still make puzzles challenging. The idea was never to make this something you could just breeze through. The idea was to make the systems and the gameplay easy to understand and then the challenge in the puzzle and the actual execution of it,' he adds.
Although all the previous Survival Kids games were made in Japan, this reboot is by Unity – the makers of the Unity graphics engine, whose logo you will have seen before the start of many indie and AA titles. However, unlike Epic Games and their Unreal Engine, Unity has never made a game themselves before and this is their first proper foray into development.
'We have, behind the scenes, for years, helped developers who are using Unity engine to achieve what they need to. So, we've helped with performance optimisation, porting Unity across to a new platform, and this is really helpful because it allows us to production verify all new versions of Unity,' studio head and producer Andrew Dennison told us.
'We can test them on customer projects, but there's a limit to that as the project's not yours and there's maybe only a narrow window of what you're looking at.
'So the opportunity we saw, probably about three years ago, was 'How could we do something bigger?' What if, for a publisher, we built an entire game and that would let us test the breadth of the engine, and particularly if we could – which we somehow managed to do with this game – align it with a new platform launch. Because we can prove that Unity is ready for Nintendo Switch 2.'
'We met at Gamescom in 2022 and Unity were looking for a project. I was looking for an external studio to work on Konami IP. It soon became evident that we had lots of shared goals, lots of shared appetites, for what we wanted to do. We both wanted to do multiplayer co-op, social game experience with all the family – so that was how it started,' adds Jones.
'The game started off completely platform agonistic. We knew what we wanted to make, we knew our target audience, and this time, in the planning stages, the next Nintendo console was way off in the distance, we didn't know much about it.
'It wasn't until we got a little further into that, after pre-production and into the early parts of development that the release window started to solidify and that aligned with our schedule. And that was when we first sat up and started thinking seriously that we could hit the launch date with this.'
Maths fans will have already worked out that that means Unity made the whole game in less than three years. Just over two, in fact, according to Dennison, who reveals that full development only started in March 2023.
Compared to the five or more years that a modern AAA game can take – and the terrible cost for the developer if it's not an instant hit – and suddenly Survival Kids' modest visuals make much more sense.
'I don't have an up-to-date reference for how AAA studios are running things but I know for sure that there are economies to be had by keeping a team tight, well-organised, and what was great working with Konami – and I genuinely mean this – is there was a ticking clock,' says Dennison.
'You have this much time and that forces you to make the right decisions. We knew a window, so we knew we had to have the game done by end of '24, so we'd have enough time. And it's really useful to have those deadlines, because it forces you to make those decisions.'
The game features a relatively realistic physics engine, so that if something drops in a river it will float downstream and have to be collected later, while explosive fruits can be rolled or catapulted in the air. You can play on your own – and we did for about 20 minutes as a test – and it's fine, but it's much more enjoyable when everyone is running around, trying to grab the glory for themselves and blaming every mistake on someone else.
'Some of the emergent silliness comes out of the physics. When you cut a tree down it will roll down a slope into the water when you're you're trying to grab it,' says Jones. 'It's amazing how difficult it can be for two people to carry a log.'
The game can be played by up to four players online and that was simulated at the event, by playing with other journos. There's also a two-player couch co-op mode which you can play on the same console and with only one Joy-Con each. This worked great too and means you can play it co-op without needing to pay for Nintendo Switch Online or anything else. More Trending
We can't say how much longevity the game has until we've played the whole thing but there are various secrets and costume unlockables, which along with the time you take to finish determine how many stars you're awarded when you complete an island, with the biggest one we played taking over 30 minutes.
Although we suspect the rather bland visuals, and a price tag that seems just a tad too high, are going to be obstacles, we enjoyed our time with Survival Kids and can't wait to play it more with friends and family. In terms of gameplay our main concern now is how the game balances it's very straightforward early levels with the more complex puzzles of later on, but as long as it's a smooth segue it should be fine.
You can never have enough couch co-op games and while this doesn't necessarily seem like it needed to be a Switch 2 exclusive in order to exist, it certainly does fit Nintendo's vibe, while also being something novel and different compared to the other launch titles.
Formats: Nintendo Switch 2Price: £44.99Publisher: KonamiDeveloper: UnityRelease Date: 5th June 2025
Age Rating: 3
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