Ever since Konami started being in the business of making (and publishing) games again for the first time in years, following both the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol.1 and last year’s Silent Hill 2 Remake with Bloober Team, all eyes have been on them. Are they back in action? What’s next on their agenda? It turns out that it was releasing a launch game for the Nintendo Switch 2 in Survival Kids, a return to the survival series that started back on the Game Boy Colour, went on to make several entries on the DS, and then disappeared. This time, developed by Unity (yes, really). How is it exactly? Well, it’s a console launch filler title that’s largely focused on targeting kids; probably about what you’d expect.

Survival Kids features 9 levels and 3 biomes. Each level situates one to four players on an island, tasking survivors with setting up camp, completing gathering tasks, and gradually moving deeper into the island, eventually culminating in the building of a raft and escape. You’re transients, with the islands placed on the back of turtles, with emphasis on verticality and rising tides appearing when you clear an area, preventing you from doubling back.

What is most kid-friendly is the lack of difficulty for each level. There are no hunger mechanics, and there’s essentially no combat other than now and then avoiding one or two nuisance turrets firing purple goo pellets that knock you back. What this means is that there’s no dying in Survival Kids. The closest you get to it is falling into a deep body of water that your character can’t swim in, quickly resetting them before long. This is a wise design decision, allowing audiences to focus on the fun, emergent gameplay moments and puzzles that occur throughout the island.

Each mission is a hard reset with nothing earned from the prior level carried over.  Players must build their camp again, along with going through the loop of undergoing the general tasks of an island, including fishing, cooking and building a bunch of tools and utilities to aid traversal. Throughout a given stage, you’ll find areas where a series of items need to be delivered to it to complete a blueprint, like, say, having a climbing net to reach higher ground. To do so, you’re undergoing traditional survival or crafting game gathering; chopping down trees, mining stone and picking apart vines, then bringing them over to complete the recipe.

There are some flourishes to make the game feel closer to a traditional survival game. Though you don’t need to worry about starvation, cooking up fruits and fish in the camp’s pot will add to your stamina meter, required to retrieve a heavy object buried in sand or scale a high-reaching climbing net. It’s handy to assign someone this chef role, constantly cooking up a healthy batch of dishes, given how quickly that stamina will drop as you complete tasks. When it comes to heavy objects like logs or the remnants of a sail, carrying is smoother with two players, both lifting each end and moving it about like a removalist in Moving Out. This is where Survival Kids sings and soars the most, having each player delegated into roles and keeping things constantly moving.

There are even moments of ingenuity where you have to use a giant leaf to produce gusts of wind in puzzles. Not only will this activate pylons, but there’s a sequence where you’re in a maze-like structure, blasting gusts of wind through gaps in walls to push a vital object through to the exit. These delightful puzzles are few and far between, but they’re healthy additions to mix up the monotony.

Survival Kids positions itself as a kid-friendly approach to survival games. While that isn’t entirely dishonest and a lot of the elements are there, you’re also not exactly fighting for your life or living the Lord of the Flies-esque nightmare you’d expect from the genre. That’s okay and fine, but the experience also doesn’t trust in the ability, maturity and even attention spans of its younger audience. I was there on day one playing Minecraft in my teenage years, but I still reel when I see the things kids build and do in it today. I can’t help but feel like Survival Kids, having this level-based approach instead of an open world, means it’ll struggle to really captivate a younger audience. When your competitor is Microsoft’s crafting and creation hit, an experience with a big world with thousands of interesting sights pulling you in every direction… how are you meant to keep up?

The fun you make in Survival Kids is the fun you have with friends. It’s laughing as your friend carrying a big, heavy log with you accidentally plummets off the side of a cliff and into the water. It’s unlocking one of the many different cosmetics you have in the game to finally be able to distinguish your characters from one another, maybe even setting up roles for each person to focus on in a mission. Very scarce amounts of that are thanks to the game and the foundations it gives you, but instead, the company you keep.