You can name them (I formed a very close bond with one called Heston) and should you become close friends with them, they'll help you out with sporadic gifts of resources culled from around the island. Better still, the island is populated by three chimps who can be won over with bananas. If you want to go where even Tom Hanks feared to tread, you can even get romantic with it. You can chat to your inanimate pal, even argue with them. You could, if you fancy, build a friend from sand and fruit. Loneliness is also a major problem in the early stages, and the game has some amusing ways of satiating this need. When you start out you can only really create a small campfire - on which you can crudely roast whatever food you find - and a rudimentary shelter, which will keep you safe from the tropical rainstorms but won't do much to lift your Sims spirits. A true desert island delicacy.īut to begin with, your priorities are fairly simple: food and shelter. There's no limit to what you can horde, so it makes sense to stockpile right from the start. You can soon start filling up your inventory with driftwood and bananas you find lying on the beach, while a few swishes with your knife will earn you bamboo shoots, palm fronds and other organic building materials. You've got a mat for sleeping on, a pocket knife and an infinite roll of toilet paper for those private moments. The R1 button speeds up time, if you get tired of watching the same animations over and over. Stand next to an object or item and the available options pop up in the bottom right hand corner.

Rather than guiding a floating cursor to inspect and interact with things, you're in direct control this time around, moving your Sim with the left stick and rotating the camera with the right. They all get separated, so you start the game proper with just one Sim - you get to choose which one - and must then fend for yourself in this primitive environment. At least, not to start with.Īfter creating a group of up to six Sims, using a rather thin array of design options, the game wastes no time in spoiling their boating holiday by tossing them into the brine and washing them ashore on a desert island. At first glance, it seems like The Sims 2 Castaway (not to be confused with the confusingly titled The Sims Castaway Stories) might be another step along that road since it really doesn't play like a Sims game at all. Back in July I reviewed The Sims Pet Stories, and got a little bit excited at the idea of the Sims engine being used to create different gaming experiences and fresh interactive narratives.

The sims 2 castaway for pc