Castaway (Switch) review "Size matters."

Castaway, an adventure title from Canari Games that has nothing to do with Tom Hanks, owes a lot to The Legend of Zelda. As you progress through the main adventure in search of your dog (who was abducted when you crash landed on a hostile planet), you’ll swing your trusty sword, grapple to distant ledges using a hookshot item, and watch the three hearts that represent your life meter drain when you bump into enemies and their attacks.

But while The Legend of Zelda and its many sequels feature sprawling worlds and dungeons and shrines, Castaway offers a more abbreviated jaunt through its environment. There are only three dungeons, each of them decidedly compact. You’ll face off against three bosses and then the credits roll, at which point you can challenge a 50-floor tower.



I don’t want to be too hard on the game, which was developed by a very small team of people who clearly know what they’re doing. Its asking price isn’t especially steep ($7.99 USD at launch). And the visuals do a great job of reminding a person of past Zelda glories, including Link’s Awakening in particular (though the hero’s garb looks like the Champion’s Tunic to me, from more recent entries in that other beloved franchise). The music is very good, reminiscent of a lot of 8-bit classics. There’s a lot of charm.

Honestly, though, there isn’t enough space to allow the game to spread its wings and provide a rousing adventure.

With the exception of the final boss encounter, which gave me some trouble until I found a safe spot that turned it into a cakewalk, there’s little in the main adventure to challenge the veteran gamer. Puzzles barely count as puzzles. You push a few boulders, maybe line them up for your grappling hook and… that’s pretty much it. You can speedrun to see how low you can get your time, but that only makes it easier to see just how small the world and its dungeons truly are.



The 50-floor tower, for its part, starts out as a vaguely frustrating affair and eventually settles on tedious. Each “floor” consists of a single little area, where you square off against a few enemies. Since there aren’t a lot of unique enemies in the game, you’re just fighting the same ones repeatedly or rolling over spike traps. The confined space means some of the battles get pretty tense, especially since you start out with two hearts instead of the usual three.

As you advance through the tower and slaughter your foes, they drop coins. You can pick them up (if you hustle) and fill meters grant you random prizes. In that sense, you’re going through a bit of a roguelite. You get to pick which of three items to grab each time you fill the meter, which might refill lost life or improve your attack power or even take back that lost heart.



If you make a run at the tower and do pretty good but die near the end, that’s a lot of old ground to pass over on a subsequent attempt, and there just isn’t enough variety the whole way through to make it all feel worthwhile. Floors aren’t randomized, which is usually fine with me, but here that limitation really does drain any replay value. I made a few deep runs before I finally grew too bored to keep going, which is not a mark in the game’s favor.

I really wanted to like Castaway, and even expected to when I started playing, but I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone except players facing a time crunch who want a sample of a proper adventure before moving onto other things. With a campaign you can likely clear in a half-hour on a first run (and with little incentive to go through again), coupled with a challenge mode that wears out its welcome all too quickly, my advice to anyone looking at Castaway would be to play The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening instead, or to wait for a sale. The game certainly isn’t awful, but there are better ways to spend your time and your money.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (August 27, 2024) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.