Survival Kids review – The first fresh take on survival crafting in years

If you read a description of Survival Kids, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a very different kind of game. You see the words “co-op survival crafting game” and your mind is instantly transported to games like Ark: Survival Evolved, Valheim, and Rust — games that have become incredibly popular but all start to feel a bit samey after a while. Thankfully, Survival Kids is not that, and it’s actually pretty neat. 

Survival Kids has you teaming up with friends to progress through a series of discrete levels, each with a predefined and linear set of challenges to complete. It’s essentially a puzzle game with the mechanics of a survival crafting game — you have to figure out what to do and in what order, and to do that you have to chop down trees, craft tools, and fish up sea creatures to snack on. There’s no open-world roaming, no awkward base building or thirst meters, just all the good stuff about survival crafting games without any of the things that make them laborious. 

In multiplayer, it’s an absolute blast. I played about half the game with friends or loved ones, and I spent most of that time in tears of laughter as my co-op players and I slipped into the ocean, accidentally dropped a crucially important log off a cliff, or played little pranks on each other. There is a timer, and you’re rewarded for completing levels faster, but when you’re playing with friends none of that matters. It’s got a Human: Fall Flat vibe to it, with the physics just silly enough to make for some very funny situations. 

Playing solo is a different story. The puzzles are all completable solo, but they often require a lot of slow backtracking and long treks, particularly when transporting something heavy. If you’re playing with others they can help you carry those heavier items to speed up the process, but playing solo it’s a very slow, often frustrating slog, and if you take it to the wrong place, or it gets knocked into the ocean and resets, it can be too frustrating to bother continuing with. It’s still fun more often than not, but it loses a little something. 

It’s a shame then that the puzzles are all designed to be completed solo, stopping the game from fully taking advantage of multiplayer play. Puzzles aren’t designed to make use of having multiple people in different places on the map, and because of their linearity you can end up with a situation where two people are doing something important while a third just stands around, fishing or cooking food for no real reason. That happens less in later levels, where complexity increases and there’s a lot more that needs to be done, but it’s never fully eliminated. It’s probably too big an ask that a game like this has bespoke changes to levels depending on how many players are playing it, but it feels like it’s being held back somewhat by the need to have everything able to be completed solo. 

The best part of Survival Kids, though, is actually a feature of the Switch 2 itself: GameShare. GameShare lets you share the game locally with another console that doesn’t own the game, like the old DS Download Play or It Takes Two’s Friend Pass but without the need to download anything. It uses the bespoke streaming tech that Nintendo pioneered for the Wii U’s GamePad, and it works flawlessly, with barely noticeable latency and no drop-outs in my experience. When GameShare is active, it works identically to an online or local multiplayer game of Survival Kids, with each player having their own screen rather than a splitscreen. It even works on the original Switch, though it seems to be limited to just two other players. Still, it’s a far better option than splitscreen play if you’ve got another console on hand to use it, and I was very impressed by how well it all works. 

Survival Kids is better than I ever expected it would be, and it’s brought me an enormous amount of laughs as my friends and I stumbled through surviving on and escaping a tropical island. It’s held back somewhat by its limiting puzzle design, but when it all clicks and you’re laughing it up with friends and family, it’s hard to pay much attention to the few flaws it has.