Youda Survivor

Youda Survivor is a time-management adventure from G5 Entertainment. The story begins, as all good island survival games do, with the player washing up on the shore of a tropical island. An ancient prophesy tells the tribe of the arrival of a mysterious traveler, so when the player turns up, the island people want to know if the player is really as smart and powerful as the legend claims…

Of course, the player doesn’t actually need to follow that backstory to  gathers materials, and create valuable resources from them, and progress through the game’s levels.

Oddly, your first tasks are not so much gathering materials for a bed, building shelter, or improvising a lemon battery, but boiling gulls’ eggs and powdering them  in a powdered-egg machine…. Still, collecting island resources like shrimp and coconuts, fighting off crabs, collecting fresh water, and so forth was sufficiently island-y. And the time-management system, as found in G5’s other Youda games, is a perfect level of challenge, satisfying to complete without ever becoming too difficult.

Players will also use island magic, doing rain dances to create freshwater or mixing potions for health and stamina. This is a nice layer on the time management mechanic, especially the potion recipes. I’m not terribly motivated by unlocking achievements  or by cosmetic rewards in a single-player game, but I enjoyed crafting potions for my power-ups.

I played the Kindle Fire version, and it’s worth noting that it froze and required a restart several times. (It did not stop me from playing,  or from getting it for my dad, who loves island games as much as I do.)