There’s a menu screen where you can see all of your active tasks, review your inventory, and so on. This soon escalates to fishing, farming, catching bugs, digging out tree stumps, and so on.Ĭastaway Paradise starts you off on a fairly linear path, with each character you meet giving you a task to complete and an item to complete it with, but it morphs organically into a sandbox experience as you use the knowledge and the items you’ve obtained to forge your own destiny. As soon as you wash ashore, covered in seaweed that cleverly conceals your sex until you’re ready to disclose it, you’re put to work clearing litter, picking apples, sowing seeds, and watering plants. Your new friends are cordial but demanding hosts. Characters in Castaway Paradise are distinctive and well-formed, while the dialogue is solid, and even funny at times. These include Viktoria, a pig who is also the mayor of the island community, as well as a moose called Gustave, an ape called Angus, a duck called Amelia, and more. It’s not up to the standard of Nintendo’s cuddly island life-simulating masterpiece, of course, but it does a decent impression if you squint, and it’s a lot cheaper.Ĭastaway Paradise sees you playing as a shipwreck survivor who has the good fortune to wash up on a pleasant little island populated by helpful, friendly – but odd-looking – animals who can talk. If you like the Animal Crossing games, you’ll probably quite like Castaway Paradise.
That might save you the trouble of reading this review. Those are developers’ own words, helpfully displayed in the sitelink text when you search for Castaway Paradise on Google. We've contacted Stolen Couch Games for its take on how much Nintendo inspired the game.Normally we try to be tactfully indirect when suggesting that a game might be a little bit inspired by another game, but there’s no need for that in the case of Castaway Paradise.
It's not the first mobile game we've seen which owes a debt to Animal Crossing - free-to-play iOS and Android title Happy Street has also been widely compared to Nintendo's series. There's also a farming mechanic, which looks similar to Harvest Moon. Unlike Animal Crossing, the game features a free-to-play economy which you pay for in real-world cash. A UK date has yet to be announced.įamilyGamerTV has recorded a look at some of the game's features in the video below - note the similarity to Animal Crossing even in Castaway Paradise's animations for fishing and swinging your bug net. The product of Stolen Couch Games, Castaway Paradise has been given a soft launch on the iOS App Store in Canada, Australia and Vietnam.
It sounds and looks a lot like Nintendo's Animal Crossing.
ORIGINAL STORY 20/6/14 4.15pm Have you heard about Castaway Paradise? It's a life simulation set in a bright, stylised village where you live with anthropomorphic animals, catch fish, collect bugs and help out your neighbours. "I hope everyone will check out Castaway Paradise and let us know what they think of the game, when it launches later this year." There are many differences between the before mentioned games and Castaway Paradise. We're even considering bringing Castaway Paradise to the Wii U. We've showed Castaway Paradise to them and everything is fine. All I can say it that we've been talking to Nintendo for years. "Some people are concerned of Nintendo's opinion of our game. The team has even considered bringing the free-to-play life sim to Wii U, Diepeveen continued. We've taken the best aspects of life simulators and improved and expanded on these aspects." "What we tried to do is create an experience similar to those games but for all platforms, including mobile and Steam. "Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon and The Sims are all inspirations for Castaway Paradise," Stolen Couch co-founder Eric Diepeveen told Eurogamer.
UPDATE 23/6/14 2.15pm Castaway Paradise developer Stolen Couch Games has told Eurogamer that Nintendo is aware of the game and "everything is fine" - despite its similarities to Animal Crossing.