Survival Kids

Lore & Background

The game's story is minimal: the player character, either a boy named Ken (Kou in Japan) or a girl named Mery (Nami in Japan), becomes stranded on a deserted island after a storm capsizes their boat. The player must actively work to survive and possibly find a way to escape back to civilization. Interaction with other characters is scarce or entirely absent, depending on how the player chooses to progress.

Gameplay uses a 2D view characteristic of adventure games of its generation, such as The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon. The player must track hunger, thirst, and fatigue meters in addition to traditional Health Points, requiring everyday tasks like eating, drinking, sleeping, hunting, gathering, and finding a place to rest. A key feature is the item-crafting system, called "merging" in-game, which allows combining two or three objects to form tools, weapons, and other items. For example, a vine and a flexible piece of tree can form a bow; a stick, bird feather, and pointed rock can form arrows; and a flexible piece of tree with fishing gut can form a fishing rod.

Many items degrade over time and break, requiring the player to build replacements. Foods like meats can rot in just an in-game day, but cooked meats can be merged with certain flora (identified as spices) to preserve them. There are about 15 set types of flora, but their effects when eaten are randomized in every new game. The game is non-linear, giving the player freedom to progress without specific goals beyond basic survival, and features multiple endings dependent on discoveries, crafted objects, and the situation after a certain amount of time.

Reader's Guide

Survival Kids is notable as an early example of the survival genre on a handheld platform, released years before the genre became a popular standard. Retro Gamer included it on their list of top ten Game Boy Color games. Retrospectively, Nintendo Power praised the game for its unique design and described it as "inventive" and deserving of a "second look." Retro Gamer called it "original," and Game Informer stated the title was "innovative" and designed a survival game "on a small scale years before the genre became a popular standard." The game's open-ended structure, multiple endings, and crafting system were distinctive for its time. It spawned a sequel, Survival Kids 2: Dasshutsu! Futago Shima, released on July 19, 2000, which added multiple openings and Game Link Cable support. The series continued on the Nintendo DS with Lost in Blue (2005), Lost in Blue 2 (2007), and Lost in Blue 3 (2008), with Japanese versions retaining the Survival Kids title. A Wii game titled Survival Kids Wii was released in 2008 in Japan, and as Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked in North America. A new Survival Kids game developed by Unity Technologies was released for the Nintendo Switch 2 in June 2025.

Did You Know?

• Survival Kids was released in 1999 for the Game Boy Color and is known as Stranded Kids in Europe.
• The game features a crafting system called 'merging' that allows combining two or three objects into tools like bows and arrows.
• The game's first official re-release was on the Nintendo Classics service on May 23, 2025.