Toronto’s High Park Zoo is the oldest animal display in Canada, dating all the way back to 1893. Open year-round, it allows more than 600,000 annual visitors to come and see all kinds of animals for free. Clearly, there’s a lot of history there, and that’s exactly what an upcoming Canadian game aims to highlight.
Enter Capy Castaway, a cozy adventure title from local independent developer Kitten Cup Studio, the team behind the 2023 cat-themed tea-making simulator Pekoe. In Capy Castaway, you play as a capybara (Capy) and crow (Corvi) who are whisked away in a big storm to a mysterious island, forcing them to team up to find a way home.
Since the game’s reveal, Kitten Cup has been open about how it was inspired by the High Park Zoo and Toronto as a whole, which certainly piqued my interest. But it wasn’t until I actually got the chance to visit the zoo with the development team and a small group of media and creators for a more behind-the-scenes look that I began to really appreciate the depth of those influences.
Inspired by Toronto’s own capybara escape
“The original idea for Capy Castaway was actually inspired by an illustration that I did in 2016, so it was quite a while ago. People were posting all these capybaras online, and I just got inspired, and I just drew it,” says Saffron Aurora, Kitten Cup CEO and creative director.
As it so happened, this was also around the time of the infamous Toronto tale of two capybaras, “Bonnie and Clyde,” who escaped the High Park Zoo and prompted a month-long escapade to return them. Naturally, this only provided more inspiration to Kitten Cup, who has since headed to High Park for multiple research trips, drawing on everything from capybaras, peacocks, and cows to Barbary sheep, emus, and yaks. As we walk through the park, the team shows us many of these animals that ended up in the game.
But while the Bonnie and Clyde story proved to be a wild ordeal for all involved, Kitten Cup wants Capy Castaway to be a much more relaxing and cozy experience. In practice, this means a wonderfully vibrant world that draws from Aurora’s striking visual sensibilities, which you may also know from her work as the art director on the acclaimed, bright and eye-catching Doug-esque The Big Con from Toronto indie developer Mighty Yell.
Through this rich aesthetic, Capy Castaway introduces a colourful cast of animal characters led by Capy, a mute pup whose stubby little paws and wide button eyes just ooze cuteness, and Corvi, who makes up for their companion’s silence with ample sarcasm and even the occasional French.
At any time, players can control Capy or Corvi, the former being able to sniff, dig and push objects, while the latter can reach distant items and even pick up their otherwise grounded friend to travel short distances. In keeping with the cozy vibe, Corvi also helps make the game more approachable for younger or less experienced players by serving as a way to convey information, similar to Link’s fairy companion Navi in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
“The vibe that I hope that we’re achieving here is like when you make a friend on the playground, you just show up and you’re like, ‘Oh, hey!’ And then suddenly, you guys are going on a little adventure,” says Aurora, who notes that the team even added an optional co-op mode for this reason. Based on a demo that we were shown, which was also briefly made available on Steam, I can see exactly what she means.
Playfulness and whimsy abound
All told, there’s a lovely sense of playfulness in seeing our dynamic duo together as they explore the island and come across all kinds of little activities, like a mud pile to run around in, impromptu games of fetch or, in a particular highlight for the team, the ability to stack miscellaneous objects like fruit, wood and even pylones on your head to create the world’s largest, quirkiest hat.
“I do think it is like the most fun and cursed inventory system that I can think of,” says community manager Bee Zelda with a laugh. In addition to allowing for player expression, Capy will also need to stack items on their head to transport them for puzzles and other quests. In the demo, this manifests in a swallow with a chef’s hat instructing Capy and Corvi to create a special soup to impress a group of judges.
In a particularly delightful and inspired bit of character design, the judge in question is someone called “Gooseberus,” a Cerberus-inspired mega-sized goose whose three heads are named Loonie, Toonie and Buck. Aurora says this was the result of the team wanting a comically “disgusting” take on the iconic honking birds, and it’s a perfect representation of the game’s sense of whimsy.
Starring Toronto
But Capy Castaway doesn’t just feature the animals of Toronto; it also uses them to pay tribute to the city’s history. Throughout the game, you’ll see nods to the likes of the CN Tower and Rogers Centre, Tim Hortons-esque coffee cups, old TTC tokens, Ontario Place, the Queen Street Viaduct, Honest Ed’s and even Ananas, the talking pineapple from the French-Canadian ’80s children’s show Téléfrançais.
“It does make it really easy to be like, ‘Oh, what’s this thing that we really like that we’re really familiar with that we grew up with?'” says Aurora of the decision to make these kinds of references. “A lot of the game is trying to preserve parts of Toronto that have disappeared. It’s very much a love letter. It’s also a big part of the narrative as well. Like, the Honest Ed’s sign is no longer with us — RIP!”
For Zelda, these inclusions also afford the rare opportunity for Toronto — a city often known for standing in for other cities in film and TV productions — to actually play itself.
“One of the things that I think about a lot for the city of Toronto — the municipal pastime is apathy. It has a lot of difficulty being excited about the city that it is and not the city that it could be or just is,” says Zelda. “Like, when ‘Chicago’ is always filmed in Toronto, when ‘New York’ is always filmed in Toronto, it has the air of, ‘It’s cooler to be something else.’ And so a big part [of Capy Castaway] — at least in how I feel about the game — is very much celebrating Toronto as Toronto over it being something else […] Because it’s very seldom that you get to actually see Toronto get to be Toronto.”
As proof of everything Kitten Cup has been talking about, our time at the zoo concluded with finally getting to see the capybaras come outside. Before long, groups of park visitors, from families with kids to an English couple, all came over to watch the large rodents walk around. Honestly, there was an infectious joy in watching people from all over gather in one of Toronto’s oldest venues, in so doing celebrating its 100-plus years of history.
So far, Capy Castaway looks to be a wholesome and thoughtful encapsulation of that very feeling, making it one of the most uniquely promising games on the horizon.
Capy Castaway will launch on Steam (PC and Mac) in 2026.
Image credit: Kitten Cup Studio
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