A thirty-minute-long game stretched to several hours. Most readers will likely see such a description of Castaway and assume it to be pejorative, but that could not be further from the truth. In the age of obsessing over length and value, Canari Games humbly presents their little work of art in hopes it can guide its players to the way, ideally, all games should be played: without expectations of grandeur, but with full commitment to mastering all it has to offer.
An unabashed tribute to Link’s Awakening, Castaway’s main mode of play in which you take on three dungeons takes no longer than fifteen minutes to beat for anyone familiar with the gameplay style, after which the main character gets transported to a tower, which serves as a roguelike mode with randomized upgrades, but same rooms each time through. There is not much here. Good. You will need to know everything front to back.
You will need to know how much distance a full roll needs not to bonk into a wall and bounce off, how long hookshotting across the screen or swinging a pickaxe takes, or how many swings you can get in on a boss before their next phase. I mean, sure, all the other modes are optional, but you got this game so you might as well try them out, right? And look at all those cool achievements!
Castaway tries its best to reel the player in, be that with the promise of a 100% completion achievement, a speedrun timer, an “unfair” difficulty, or the “one more run” feel of its roguelike mode. None of these ideas are necessarily new but are often left up to the players to explore on their own, without any built-in method. If anything, my eight hours of trying to beat its fifteen–minute–long main mode hitless is a testament to its success.
In a perfect world, we would be able to become the very best we can be at every single game we pick up. This is how it used to be for me when my access to entertainment was limited. I did not have internet at home for a very long time, so free online games were a no-go. Everything I had was gifted to me, and I cherished it, always replaying or retrying anything I owned until I just could not force myself to play them anymore.
Perhaps it is due to its length, that Castaway can put me in that space today, as a person with access to an unlimited amount of games. That and the popularity of a lot of self-imposed rulesets in online gaming content, where speedrunning, nuzlocking, no-hitting, and other self-imposed rulesets are garnering more attention than ever. Coupled with the rise of short-form content, it seems that this tiny, but darn solid chunk of top-down Zelda unexpectedly became a sort of herald of impending change.
Every mode recontextualizes different aspects of the game in some way. The crisp pixel art is best enjoyed in the calm pacifist mode. New strategies must be adapted when going for the fastest time. Fondness for certain kinds of upgrades grows the more you perfect climbing up the tower. Inconspicuous encounters suddenly become run-killers while trying to play as safely as possible in the no-hit mode. The player is nudged to explore every angle through which Castaway could be enjoyed, all within a very reasonable timeframe.
On the other hand, each mode highlights different issues. Unfortunately, this is far from the best piece of Zelda out there. Hard to count how many times I lost a hitless run due to my inability to mistrust my eyes. The somewhat mediocre enemy AI would stumble while trying to find the best way to reach my little guy through the tight and cluttered passageways, the animation signaling their incoming attack hidden under the visual of the sword passing through them as if made of butter. Without much room to maneuver, offense is the only option, so whenever it faltered, I felt a bit cheated.
This may poison any enjoyment otherwise derived from the many small elements that are otherwise perfectly serviceable. The soundtrack is far from the most memorable, and though the sound effects have a nice heft to the clangs, it will all eventually get buried in the repetition. You can only excite someone to keep going so many times until they tune out all the noise to focus on the task at hand.
It is nevertheless a great feeling to master a game again. To know something in and out like this. All the numbers make gaming a bit overwhelming as an adult. The prices, the sales, the backlog. How many have you completed this year, where would you rank them? Sometimes fully taking one thing in, and learning the full extent of its strengths and defects can prove more illuminating than adding another experience onto a never-ending pile. Perhaps what you need is getting swept up in Castaway.
Mateusz played Castaway on PC with a review code.
