Castaway Review

Castaway is an awesome throwback to the SNES/Gameboy era. It has different difficulty options to make the game as easy or as hard as you want. However, the achievements are challenging. As you have to play with the unfair difficulty and have to get through the roguelike part of the game.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: This is skill-based, but I would guess somewhere around 5 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 8/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 3x through the first part of the game (Normal mode, Speedrun mode (no time limit, just play with this setting on), unfair mode. And multiple times through the second part of the game until you reach tower level 51
Is there a good guide available: No, but you don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No, you have to play through speedrun mode but the time doesn’t matter
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, you have an achievement for a playthrough on unfair mode (1 life, no save points)
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Castaway is a lovely throwback to SNES/Gameboy era. You play as this guy who is stranded on this island after a crash and lost his gear and dog in the crash… (or to be more specific local wildlife stole your gear and dog). So it is up to you to get your gear, and most importantly, your dog, back!

The game has 2 different modes. the first one is the action-adventure mode in which you retrieve your gear from 3 different dungeons. This mode takes about an hour the first time you play it, just because you don’t know the way and where to get what. It comes with a bunch of difficulty levels, from invisible, to easy, to normal and even unfair. Because of those difficulties, this can be played by everyone as it gets as easy or as hard as you like.

The second mode unlocks after finishing the action-adventure mode for the first time. It is a roguelike in which you fight through different levels of a tower that gets increasingly harder, but you also get experience to increase your stats. This mode is very challenging!

It was so nice to get a throwback to my early gaming days on the Gameboy. It reminded me so much of Mystic Quest (but I didn’t play Zelda: A Link to the Past which it should people remind more of). It was so nice to move around with a hook shot again. I forgot how challenging the puzzles could be back in the day and it took my mind a little time to switch to those types of puzzles. I thought I was stuck in the beginning and even restarted on a new save file to choose a different route.. however, it turned out, that I wasn’t stuck, just a little bit stupid 😛 but most of all, not in the right mindset yet. It didn’t take long or I was grooving through the game without any problems.

Castaway has a lot of achievements that you’ll unlock just through your first playthrough and going through the action-adventure mode. However, it also comes with a lot of very challenging achievements. Getting through the action-adventure mode with the “unfair” difficulty… is quite unfair 😛 You only have 1 life and no save points. And it has achievements to reach the end of the roguelike mode which should be around floor 51. Personally, my record was around floor level 25 or so. But keep in mind that I’m not a hardcore gamer and normally prefer to play games on the easy difficulty. The small spiders were the bane of my existence and were the ones who mostly killed me.

This review for Castaway was written on 12 Augustus 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 33 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.