Castaway has some frustrating features - an inventory which is too small for the game content, inventory slots filled with equipped items, insanely fragile pets, and poorly designed game controls. Also, despite the visual charm of the pets, their special skills are hard to distinguish, at least in the early game. Worst of all, keeping pets is a chore verging on a guilt trip. You can't leave the village without a pet, if you don't want one. Instead you have to take a weak unwanted pet with you, and then allow it to be killed, which will happen very quickly. But if you do want to take a pet, you have to labour for hours to keep it alive, which is all basically futile, because it's doomed to meet a nest of scorpions, and then perish. It's all a bit weird and twisted! Perhaps the developers have got something against animals or people who like them! But despite all that, I can't help liking this game and rating it 4/5, almost entirely because of the great graphics.
@fridek thanks, I'll try your strategy as far as possible, but I think you might be talking about a different challenge. There's no artillery in the Iron Challenge, therefore no Big Bertas can be made.
Brilliant game, but getting the Kingdom: Rushed Badge is slowly driving me insane. Has anyone found a strategy that works on the *current* version of the Iron Challenge on the Dark Tower (level 12)? I've made about 50 attempts and can't crack it. Is it actually possible that buying premium makes that particular challenge harder? LOL
This is a fantastic game, probably the best on Kongregate. It's incredibly fun, stylish and original with a great sense of humour. The voice acting and the graphics totally crack me up. It's one of the few games that I'd spend kreds on. I bought premium to support the developers as much as to get the extra content, although it's totally worth it for the two extra levels. I really can't wait to see the next game from Ironhide. There's just one thing I'm wondering about - after making all the possible upgrades, you can still have stars left over. That makes me hope there'll be some more content added to this game. I hope so.
Initially, I had mixed feelings about this game. The musaic box concept is utterly brilliant. It's a fantastic idea which has potential to be of almost universal interest, literally to almost every person, of every age, in every culture. But I wasn't keen on the way it's been implemented here, which isn't exactly far sighted. Firstly, the music box is embedded in a tedious and rather parochial hidden object game. Secondly, some of the tunes are less than tuneful. Some of them are deeply unmusical and blatantly off key. But then I reached the Blue Danube puzzle! Man alive, that Blue Danube puzzle is superb. It's worth playing the whole game just for that puzzle alone. I'm not even a fan of the waltz. But that is something quite beautiful.
There's a small bug in this game. If you choose to take Ryanth instead of Martine, she keeps appearing in conversations at crucial moments instead of him. It's a bit spooky.
@Hellwolf92 - The lead developer for this game is the same guy who created Monster's Den, the game that this one resembles. Check your facts before you make accusations. And learn some manners.
Check out garin's blog, Monstrum. There is a third game in the pipeline, Monster's Den:Godfall, although it has no release date yet. It looks fantastic, with lots of new content and great artwork. I'm still hooked on the original game, despite having made it to level 50 hardcore, because there's so many different character and weapon combos to try out. I'm not feeling impatient. It's well worth the wait. These games are superb.
Brilliant game, really enjoyable and interesting. Great character classes, skills, weapons, armour, etc. So many decisions to be made at every turn! I want to play this to the end before playing Book of Dread. 5/5 and favourite.
Brilliant sci fi game. Very deep and atmospheric. But I got disorientated and couldn't finish it. I don't think it would make the game too easy to provide some sort of map that opens up as you unlock different areas.
Superb game, very well thought out and enjoyable. The weapons, armour and spells, and the spellcasting interface are excellent although it would be even better if you could read the spell properties from the spell menu. Great artwork, fonts and game guide. (But where is the Soulbound spell that lets you save the game?) Really looking forward to the full release. 5/5
This is an extraordinary game. I can't say enough good things about it. I've never encountered a game so imaginative and so magical. A secret world of woods, fairyflies, a fox with the power of flight who can climb the tallest trees and explore dark caves, and magic runes which can teleport him around. Gorgeous. And that's not even to mention the designer's technical brilliance. A beautiful and original idea, implemented perfectly. 5/5 and most definitely a favourite.
I think this game needs balancing. There is at least one class combination which cannot win. If anybody else has beaten the 4th boss with Bard + Mage then please prove me wrong, but I think I've tried every possible combo of moves and they get killed every single time. The Mage has no stunning or weakening moves so he's completely useless in that fight.
This game appeals to me a lot, but I have one big problem with it. It hurts my eyes. I can hardly read it. It looks like it was designed for a screen about twice the size and then compressed.
I think this game would be much better if there was no charge for respec. It would be more interesting if you were able to reallocate your points to prepare for each battle. That way you would learn more about how all the skills work and get more out of the game.
@Selendraco - Here's something that you can do to back up the game. Find a file called giabGcChapter0SaveData.sol which is inside a folder called chat.kongregate.com. On Windows XP, it is inside a subfolder of Documents and Settings\USER_NAME\ApplicationData\Macromedia\Flash Player. (If you're on Windows 7, I think it's Users\USER_NAME\ApplicationData\Macromedia\Flash Player, but I'm not 100% sure.) In my case, the subfolder is called T8LDSG7S but yours will have another similar-looking name. Anyway, so once you've located giabGcChapter0SaveData.sol, take a copy of it when you reach a point in the game that you want to save, and that's your game backup. If it gets wiped, you can always restore it.
@Selendraco - Sorry to hear that, I know how it feels. There are some things you can check out. If your browser is set to clear the cache when you exit, make sure that offline web data is not being cleared. Or it could be a problem with the size of your local Flash cache. To check this, in the Save Game screen, right click anywhere and select Settings. Where it says 'How much information can chat.kongregate.com store on your computer?' if the size is set to 10MB or less then try setting it to unlimited. If you can't fix the problem, then you could consider playing this game elsewhere. At Armor Games you have the ability to save your game data as text. Good luck.
There is one thing I'd like to tweak in this game. It's only too easy to ruin a grade 3+ dual gem by accidentally combining it with the wrong pure gem, as some of the dual colours look like unrelated pure colours e.g. lime+blue looks like pure cyan, yellow+blue looks like pure purple (which is pink, unlike the proper purple in the original Gemcraft). Obviously you can check the gem data by mousing over the gem, but it would be really helpful if dual gems could just be identified at a glance by a design feature, or if the component colours were visible instead of a blended colour.
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