Survival Kids

About Survival Kids

Survival Kids (1999), known in Europe as Stranded Kids, is Konami's open-ended Game Boy Color survival game, in which a shipwrecked child crafts tools from island materials to stay alive and perhaps escape.

Survival Kids in Depth

After a storm capsizes their boat, the player character, a boy named Ken or a girl named Mery, is stranded on a deserted island and must work to survive and perhaps find a way back to civilisation. The backstory is minimal, and contact with other characters is scarce or absent depending on how the player proceeds. Seen from a 2D view like The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon, the game tracks hunger, thirst and fatigue alongside health, so the player must eat, drink and sleep, hunting, gathering and finding places to rest.

At its heart is merging, a crafting system: most objects are useless on their own, but two or three can be combined into tools, weapons and other items. A vine and a flexible piece of tree make a bow, a stick, bird feather and pointed rock make arrows, and a flexible piece of tree with fishing gut makes a rod. Kindling, arrows, torches and other items wear out and break, forcing players to make more, and meat rots within a day unless cooked and preserved with spices; around 15 kinds of plants exist, but their effects when eaten are shuffled each new game. The structure is non-linear, with no set goals beyond survival, and many endings depend on what the player discovers and crafts and the situation after a certain time.

Making Survival Kids

Konami developed and published it for the Game Boy Color in 1999. It attracted more attention in retrospect than at release: Nintendo Power called it "inventive" and deserving of a "second look", Retro Gamer described it as "original", and Game Informer called it "innovative", a small-scale survival game made years before the genre became a popular standard. The series continued with Survival Kids 2, which added multiple openings and link cable support, then on the Nintendo DS as Lost in Blue, Lost in Blue 2 and Lost in Blue 3, on the Wii, and in a new Survival Kids for Nintendo Switch 2 in June 2025.