Amazing, until I encountered a game-breaking bug

The game is very fun, a beautifully remastered classic that looks stunning on my 21.5” screen. Unfortunately, some aspects of its design make it very limited; saying that there are two separate “modes”, freeplay and story, is somewhat inaccurate. There is one map where you can play story, and one map where you can play freeplay (and the freeplay map is really, really boring). The story, on the other hand, is interesting, but the presence of linear goals kinda makes you feel like you’re not making your own decisions. Still, it’s a good way to ease yourself into the game. However, the worst part of this system is that you cannot fully enjoy the freeplay mode until you have beaten the entire story mode. As a result, the freeplay mode feels rather half-baked and pointless. But in any case, the game is still certainly worth it for its story mode, that is, until you get stuck.

And I don’t mean coming to a place in the game that is difficult to pass, I mean literally getting stuck.

Myself and a fellow NPC got stuck in a certain area of the pond in the second place you live, and my pet orangutan got stuck in the midst of retrieving a banana from a tree. Saving and restarting the game got my pet orangutan and I unstuck, but the NPC was still frozen in place in the pond. “No matter,” I thought, “I’ll just use cheats to solve everything.” But then I came to a terrible realization: cheating is disabled in this version of the game, or, at least, in the story mode. Not only does this severely limit the player’s playstyle, it prevents them from fixing simple bugs like the one aforementioned.

“At least you can still continue the story!” You might think. However, this is not the case. My story cannot progress because my current task involve chatting with the frozen NPC. That means I cannot get any new quests, the other human NPCs in the world who were part of the goal will never reappear, and I am permanently stuck with a starving, half-naked man bathing in my front yard. None of these situations are desirable.

The only way around this is to start an entirely new game, and even then I won’t be able to guarantee it won’t happen again. I refuse to do so. Plus, as I said earlier, the freeplay mode is boring, especially when you haven’t beaten story mode yet. Therefore, the game is currently worthless to me, and I cannot recommend it until this bug is fixed. I will also be unable to give it a full 5-stars unless cheats are added or more features are granted to freeplay mode.

SoldierJ115 about The Sims™ 2: Castaway Stories, v1.0.0