In an industry filled with over-the-top, high octane, high-stakes moments, it wouldn’t be too crazy to think of a moment to unwind — and Capy Castaway is coming to offer just that.
We had a chance to play a demo of Big Blue Sky’s second gaming outing (the first being Merchants of Rosewall) during our 4-day-run-around coverage of Brasil Game Show (BGS 2025) and, well, we can say our hands-on with it came in a perfect timing.
You see, Capy Castaway is not a game aimed to be competitive: sure, there are challenges and missions and quests and objectives to fulfill (its the definition of “game” after all). But the thing is, “winning” is not really this indie’s thing.
Instead, it just encourages the player to take on some funny activities that are not crazy difficult — in fact, they’re so easy you’re almost playing it through guesswork alone. But here’s the kicker: where you might read “too easy”, the whole point of this premise is exactly to give you a breather, a small time where you can just sit back and not think about crazy strategies to beat that Final Fantasy secret boss or remind yourself of the timing required to parry that Elden Ring opponent with the unforgiving moves.
Basically, Capy Castaway is a game that you’ll turn on and…let your hands play by themselves.
Capy Castaway’s “cozy” nature works because we got to try it first hand
We weren’t joking when we said BGS 2025 was a 4-day-binge of running around and trying everything (and there were a lot of things we actually left out). And because of that, plus lugging around a heavy-ish laptop while playing most demos standing up, Mikhail and I, at one moment, were ready to either go back to the press room and do nothing or call it a day, despite all the stuff we needed to do.
While walking back on the show floor, we stumbled upon Capy Castaway’s small, cabinet-sized booth — a small table with two Xbox controllers hooked up to a not-so-hidden laptop, itself hooked up to a TV through the HDMI cable. Granted, one of the event’s PR guys had already mentioned the game to us, so it was already in the back of our minds.
However, the game’s colorful visuals and easy going nature kinda gave us pause: a capybara gets separated from its parents during an island’s major flood, everything is frantic and destroyed, but fear not, as a helpful (albeit sarcastic) crow befriends our young, intrepid rodent in order to engage in…shenanigans.
Seriously, all activities in Capy Castaway are so out of place it makes you smile: on our quick demo (which, although lasting for somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes, we blazed through by watching other people play before us and taking mental notes), we had to make soup for a giant, three-headed goose and its helpful “announcer”, another bird of the “big” variety (we’re gamers, not zookeepers).
Yes, “announcer”, since the “soup” was supposed to be our entry on a contest, which was, itself, its first edition, and the comically large poultry entity was to taste and judge its…tastiness (and “eat us all”, as the game puts it, should it be unpleasant). We were to roam through the lands, finding ingredients in nature in order to create something flavorful and, after one or two visits, we had just the thing, with a little pepper, some fruit…and a stick.
We’ll say it again: a three-headed goose — each head with its own identity and name — would judge a soup context where the sole entry was a dish prepared by a capybara. On a flooded island. At no point during our playthrough we would anticipate what would come next.
Gameplay-wise, this activity was designed to showcase Capy Castaway’s mechanics: as a capybara, our protagonist cannot do certain things, like climbing steep hills, and it needs the crow to pick it up and carry it forward on some places. Meanwhile, the crow itself is not particularly strong, so hard stuff done on the ground, like digging, were a boon to him, happily delegating that to our rotund, chill friend.
You can probably see where this is going: some light puzzle work that requires both animals to work together — each on their own capacity — in order to achieve an objective, like Capy dropping ingredients close to the soup’s cauldron (an unnecessarily large tree stump) while the crow picks it up and flies above, dropping it in hot water.
Easy? Yes. Challenging? Absolutely not. And that’s the beauty of it: Capy Castaway’s greatest trump card is to be a game that you’ll breeze through in moments of downtime. It is supposed to be easy like this.
Given how we were feeling during our coverage, having the chance to unwind with this one definitely was an interesting, wholesome experience. We’ll definitely look for it whenever it comes out.
Speaking of which, the game’s Steam page, sadly, is still “TBD” on that department, but given the polished state most of its showcase at BGS was, we believe Capy Castaway might come around sooner rather than later. Anyway, here are the requirements:
| MINIMUM REQUIREMENT | WINDOWS | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| OS: | Windows 10 | High Sierra 10.13+ |
| Processor: | 1.6 GHz (Intel Core i3 or equivalent) | Apple Silicon, x64 architecture with SSE2. |
| Memory: | 4 GB RAM | 4 GB RAM |
| Graphics: | OpenGL 2.0 Compatible Graphics Card | Metal capable Intel and AMD GPUs |
| Storage: | 2 GB available space | 2 GB available space |
| Sound Card: | Stereo | Stereo |
