Game Classification

The Island: Castaway is an adventure game with a survivalist theme. The player controls Tom Allison, a car salesman that ended up shipwrecked on a strange island, after taking a holiday cruise on a ship that was hit by a tsunami. While exploring the unknown territory, he meets other survivors and joins their group, and later befriends natives from a local tribe.

Tom's energy is displayed as a meter at the top of the screen, a health bar that is slowly depleted with any actions performed by him, like walking back and forth while searching the island and running errands. It can only be restored by consuming food on a regular basis. All kinds of fruit can be found near the trees scattered around the land, with some areas more packed than others. Single units of food restore small amounts of energy, but later can be combined in dishes to increase the nutritional value by portion.

Hunting, gathering and cooking are the main survival activities, most of them requiring a series of tools. The equipment is received after completing quests, and stored in the inventory at the top of the screen, from where it can be selected and used on the appropriate portions of the scenery. Some activities are interdependent: the shovel has to be used to dig the soil and collect bait worms, allowing the fishing rod to be deployed on any large body of water, initiating a fishing mini-game where the line has to be carefully pulled and released to catch the fish.

Other tools include a bow to shoot arrows at dangerous animals, a throwing net to capture scurrying beach crabs, an axe to chop wood and a torch to explore dark places. Cooking can be performed on fire pits, requiring some woodsticks and the recipe ingredients to make a dish. The friendly tribe has a store where items can be sold and bought, and a tool shop to upgrade the tools and increase the size of the inventory bag. Upgrades cost pearls, the island's currency, that can be obtained from beached oysters or by selling objects. Manufactured items like dishes and other special objects are more valuable.

The plot is developed by doing chores for other characters, usually searching and fetching items for them on locations around the island. A red exclamation mark appears on the top of their heads when they have a mission for Tom. All the pending quests are displayed on the tasks list and at the bottom interface. If Tom is killed by wild animals, dies of starvation or expires in some other way, the game starts from the last save point with some items removed as a penalty. There's an autosave feature that records the progress every few minutes. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : PC (Windows)

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/island-castaway/