If you were watching Nintendo’s official stream for all the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct news earlier today, you might’ve seen a moment where the stream briefly broke in the middle of a cartoony, cooperative survival game. It’s not just you – the stream broke for everyone in that moment – and the kicker is that the game that suffered the most from the glitch is actually a wildly unexpected revival of a long-forgotten Konami cult classic.
Admittedly, the debut trailer for Survival Kids perhaps doesn’t do a great job of explaining why it’s interesting. It looks like a fine-enough hybrid of survival games and cartoony co-op titles, complete with fishing and cooking minigames and puzzles to solve as you try to escape the islands you’ve found yourself stranded upon. I wouldn’t have paid a whole lot of attention to it unless I’d seen the title, and the fact that the Direct stream broke before the title appeared on screen meant I nearly forgot about it by the time the broadcast resumed.
But this is Survival Kids, as I later learned. The original Survival Kids series predates the rise of both survival games and co-op party games as we know them today. The original was a Game Boy Color title with a top-down perspective similar to classic Zelda games, but the gameplay was all about managing your hunger and thirst while trying to find your way off of a deserted island.
It was an RPG-flavored take on the concept of survival, long before survival games were even a real genre. The series continued onto the DS, where it was retitled Lost in Blue for the West. The games are largely nonlinear affairs with a variety of endings to unlock, and they’ve always had a certain aura among fans of retro portables.
I was absolutely obsessed with the original Survival Kids – thanks purely to a dog-eared copy of the issue of Nintendo Power which featured a meaty walkthrough of the game. I never ended up scraping together the birthday money to get it for myself, but that memory has always left me strangely fascinated by the series.
The new Survival Kids, which returns to the old title, looks very different from its predecessors, but now that I know its pedigree I’m suddenly a lot more interested. The game is due to arrive June 5, the same day as Switch 2 itself, and it’ll be exclusive to Nintendo’s new console.
One more for the list of upcoming Switch 2 games, which is already getting crowded.
