First off, let me just say that I’ve never played an actual Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon game. I’ve always been curious and I love the genre, I just never really got a chance to play one. So when Castaway Paradise marketed itself as similar to both I was excited to give the game a chance! After being stranded on an island you’re greeted by a cast of cute villagers and immediately tasked with chores like cleaning up the beach, catching bugs, growing crops and more. Your reward for being a helpful member of the community is your own place that you can even upgrade and fill with all sorts of decorations!
It isn’t long at all until you’re able to do all the various activities on the island like the aforementioned crop growing and bug catching, as well as fishing, purchasing and selling items, getting fruit from trees and complete a seemingly endless line of quests. All of this makes for a fun cycle of doing things, selling those things for money to unlock new areas of the island and getting decorative things for yourself like filling your house with seasonal goodies and new outfits. While I only played the game for a few days, it’s clear the game runs in real-time and items swap out each season. Heck, as I was writing this review I discovered they added some Japanese-themed items!
Just like the seasons pass in real time, so do tasks and events. You get daily tasks to complete for unique, special items, and things like crops and trees take a specific amount of time before they give up their sweet, sweet bounties. But when I played it (mid-August 2018), the game’s timing system seemed broken. Over the course of a few hours, I’d have the daily challenges reset multiple times, making it essentially impossible to complete them all. I also had to re-water my expensive plants that should’ve taken a full 24 hours before they needed tending to again, but luckily it also meant they grew in a few hours or less instead of a full day. I was informed there would be a day one patch after the game released, so I made sure not to even try the game until a couple weeks later (in case they patched it again shortly after), yet I still had these issues.
I’m not sure if it was due to these timing issues or something else, but I managed to unlock all the areas on the island and upgrade every home on it within a matter of hours. This meant that all I had left to do in the game was the multitude of random quests the villagers give you all the time and daily quests that kept refreshing throughout the day. I love games where I can grind away at tasks, but I just didn’t feel compelled to keep on keeping on when it came to Castaway Paradise. Maybe if there were some ridiculously expensive goodies that were worth working toward it would’ve been a different story.
For those who do love personalizing themselves and a home of their own, there’s a lot of content here. The Summer catalog is rather huge, and that was before the Japanese-themed items were added! You also get experience from everything you do and level up with it, unlocking new rewards and the ability to buy additional items that have a minimum level requirement. If the developers really do keep adding seasonal and special items for purchase, people could keep themselves busy forever with collecting it all!
Castaway Paradise is available on PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One, iOS, and Steam (Windows and Mac).
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.