It occurred to me last month that as a survival game fan, I've never actually read the grandaddy of all survival tales: Robinson Crusoe. I love survival films (All Is Lost, Cast Away, Inside) and books (In the Heart of the Sea, Adrift), so this felt like a pretty glaring hole in my survival wisdom. I'm a smidge late to the party—the novel, one of the most widely published books in history, was written by Daniel Defoe over 300 years ago.
I didn't even know much about it other than that it's the story of a guy who gets stranded on an uninhabited island for decades. I've tried to survive on islands in at least a dozen videogames, so I thought it might be fun to see how the classic survival adventure of Robinson Crusoe stacks up against today's survival games.
The verdict: Uh, it doesn't. At all. Robinson Crusoe, both the character and the book he stars in, completely sucks.
He may have washed up on a deserted island but Crusoe honestly did very little surviving, and if the book were a survival game this dude was playing in creative mode. It's also a pretty vile piece of literature, and so racist in parts that I literally gasped while reading it—which I'll address after I tackle its failure as a survival tale. Let's dive into this stinker!
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First off, it takes quite a while for Crusoe to even get stranded on the island and for several chapters we're subjected to stories of how pretty much every time he sets foot on a boat it gets wrecked. He gets captured for a while, he meets a young boy and sells him to a ship captain (the first of many scumbag moves), he starts a plantation in Brazil, and finally, on his third or fourth shipwreck, he winds up on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. Just one man against nature: can he survive?
Yep. Quite easily! I had no idea before reading this, but Crusoe has so much stuff with him when he gets stranded. The shipwreck is barely a wreck because even though everyone besides Crusoe died, it's still filled with hundreds of pounds of supplies that haven't been exposed to seawater. There's so much on board he spends his first two weeks on the island doing nothing but unloading supplies from the ship. One of the first things he does, in fact, is craft a raft from spare wood on the ship so he can move supplies to the island. A raft isn't the first thing you craft in a survival game (unless you're playing Raft). That's way down the crafting tech tree.
Survival games don't always start you off with absolutely nothing. Sometimes you have some ragged clothing to wear, maybe some randomized items in your pockets or a bit of food to get you through your first day. Occasionally you even begin with a few basic tools. Crusoe is either using cheat codes or playing with the developers debug console open. Here's an incomplete list of what he's got available to him from day one on this island:
- Bags of nails
- A grindstone
- A crowbar
- Several broadswords and cutlasses
- Three large axes
- An "abundance of hatchets"
- Seriously: he has so many damn hatchets he doesn't bother counting them
- Seven muskets and several pistols
- 200 pounds of gunpowder that will last him, no lie, 30 fucking years
- Two barrels of bullets and a bag of smaller shot
- "Three or four compasses"
- Several empty chests
- That's right, he didn't even have to craft his own storage chests
- Rope, scissors, razors, knives, and forks
- "Three dozen" shirts and several coats
- Fabric from the ship's sails
- Bread, sugar, and flour
- Tobacco and so much rum it lasts him decades
- Barley and rice seeds
- A dog and more than one cat
A list like that is what I've got when I decide I've finished a survival game and should start playing something else. If you started a game with all that you'd have no reason to play at all. If all of that gear doesn't impress upon you just how easy of a time Crusoe has on the island, let me add one more item: he doesn't even need to craft a bed. He gets a hammock and bedding from the shipwreck. Everyone knows crafting a bed in a survival game means you now have a place to save your game and respawn, so you can breathe a little easier. And he didn't even have to do that.
Playing on peaceful
The island itself is barely even a tutorial-level environment. There are no predators on the island. Zero. There are goats and cats (not big cats, housecat-sized cats) and turtles and birds. You know the first time in a survival game where you have to face a wolf and all you've got is a pointed stick? Crusoe doesn't.
If you've ever gone to a grocery store and a hardware store on the same day, congratulations, you've just had the same survival experience as Robinson Crusoe
In the 28 years he spends on this island Crusoe only mentions being hungry one time. He's got enough bread from the ship to last for months, and he's never lacking meat because he takes a daily walk and shoots birds with one of his many guns loaded with his inexhaustible supply of gunpowder. If you've ever gone to a grocery store and a hardware store on the same day, congratulations, you've just had the same survival experience as Robinson Crusoe. If you skipped lunch your hunger meter emptied more than Crusoe's did in three decades of being stranded.
He even marvels himself at how much loot he's got to work with: "'Particularly,' said I, aloud (though to myself), 'what should I have done without a gun, without ammunition, without any tools to make anything, or to work with, without clothes, bedding, a tent, or any manner of covering?'"
I tell you what you'd do, you spoiled prick, you'd do what the rest of us do when we're stranded on an island. You start punching trees. You take a rock and a stick and whatever the hell "plant fiber" is and make an axe. You eat one million berries. You break rocks and collect ore so you can eventually smelt ingots and make copper wire and invent electronics. That's what you do.
As time passes Crusoe eventually does a little more survival stuff. After five years he crafts himself some clothing out of animal skins and makes a hat from a dead goat, which is something I'd definitely do in a game. He chops down trees with his embarrassment of hatchets, and he realistically makes a single plank from each tree trunk, which feels more fair than games that let you generate a dozen planks from a single tree. He makes shelves, he digs up clay and fires it for pottery, he fashions himself a lamp with tallow from a goat he killed and a dish he made. Fair enough. He does a ton of base-building to protect him and his mountain of loot from attacks that never happen. That's all pretty survival-y.
At one point the cats from the ship start breeding with the cats on the island and suddenly he's got a cat problem. So, he kills a bunch of the cats. And I know murdering kittens is brutal and mean, but I can't really point fingers. I was playing Core Keeper recently and I tamed some cows and set them up in a pen at my base, but they bred and bred and bred and produced so much milk that I never used that I just kind of got sick of them, so one day I just went into the pen and slaughtered them all. Horrible! But it happens in survival games.
Dude never even has to unlock bandages in his tech tree
But over the course of the nearly 30 years he spends on the island, only maybe two or three times does Crusoe face what I might call adversity. Very early on in his stay on the island he falls seriously ill and is so weak he can barely stand (this is the one time he gets hungry, by the way—not because he's out of food but because he's too sick to reach it). He eventually recovers, in part due to medicating himself with a mixture of tobacco (which he got from the ship) and rum (also from the ship). Dude never even has to unlock bandages in his tech tree, that's how easy he's got it.
Other things that seem like a major problem are quickly resolved. After planting barley he sees his crops are being eaten by birds. He can't guard the crops 24 hours a day, so it seems like he may wind up with a real food shortage. But he shoots a couple birds and the rest fly away and never once eat his crops again. Whew, that wasn't a close call! (I could also point out that the huge cat army he'd amassed would have been a clever way to deal with this bird problem, but what do I know, I'm not a famous author who's been dead for 300 years.)
God Mode
So, if it's not much of a survival story, what is Robinson Crusoe? It's a colonialist's wet dream. A white man discovers a wild island and tames it with nothing but hard work and God's providence and, oh yeah, a billion supplies that never, ever run out. Oh, also, a second ship crashes later in the book and Crusoe gets even more free shit.
And as you might guess from a book written by a religious Englishman in the 1700s it's also racist as hell. The voyage Crusoe was on when he and the crew shipwrecked was a slaving mission, and before anyone says "Well, slavery was legal back then so you can't really blame him," Crusoe wasn't even on a legal slaving mission. He and his crew were attempting to capture their own slaves so they wouldn't have to pay for them. Even within a shitty system, Crusoe was a piece of shit.
Once he establishes himself on the island, what does he start fantasizing about? Having a slave, of course, and no sooner does Crusoe start thinking about owning a slave that he gets one. He rescues a native from being eaten by cannibals, and the native immediately submits to being Crusoe's servant:
"I smiled at him, and looked pleasantly, and beckoned to him to come still nearer; at length he came close to me; and then he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever."
That's an absolutely revolting passage. Crusoe immediately names him Friday and teaches him to say "Master" and despite them being together for years and eventually being able to communicate in English, Crusoe never once asks if he had an actual name before they met. This is because Crusoe is a piece of shit.
An accomplished ship captain meets a guy with a 30-year beard and a deceased goat on his head and instantly pledges to follow him loyally
Don't worry, Friday isn't the only person who submits to Crusoe's superiority: this whole book is Defoe stroking himself over how much better Crusoe is than everyone else because he spent 30 years reading a bible on an island. Near the end of the book the captain of another ship is dumped on Crusoe's island following a mutiny and immediately submits to Crusoe's judgment and leadership. Yes, an accomplished ship captain meets a guy with a 30-year beard and a deceased goat on his head and instantly pledges to follow him loyally and without question. Makes sense.
Anyway, I didn't intend this to be a book review, but Robinson Crusoe is a bit boring, isn't really about survival, and in the end I found it to be a profoundly disgusting piece of literature. If you haven't read it, skip it and play a game instead.
