A Viking survival colony sim. This game already had a few things I was looking for going into it, and I've had a blast so far. From those lonely few hours wandering lost to building quite a large town filled with villagers. This one has a lot going on.
While you do end up building a village and summoning villagers to work in different roles. It was rather nice for a colony sim game to allow me some time to explore the map alone. The map was a random seed. It was up to me to find somewhere I wanted to call home and set up.
That is also the thing about being new to a game. You have no idea what you really need to have a strong start. I ended up using the first couple of in-game days lost in the woods.
The game has a couple of wisps that give out some basic hints. After that, while you're not totally on your own, there is a help section that you can access from the menu. Being told to make a fire and some other basic stuff is about as much guidance as this game does. After that, the best of luck to you.
The map itself seems to be a decent size. I ran around it for a couple of in-game days and still had not uncovered the entire thing. It was also nice that they gave you a giant radius of any site you discover. Letting you know about how far away you should stay from anything dangerous you run into.
Once you get a settlement up and running, you do get a decent amount of info at a glance. Along with your villagers following you around once you are in town, if things are really going badly.
The game likes to remind you as well that your settlement has issues when anything pops up. I’m just going to say it now, for quite a lot of my time there were issues. This game has quite a lot of buildings, and once you get over a dozen or so villagers. There is just a lot going on.
More often than not, though, you just have to make sure the basics are covered. The village has enough water through wells and other means. Along with food, there are so many ways of getting food from gathering, fishing, growing, and hunting. Finally, shelter, and while you can get away with ignoring some of these issues for a short time, in the end, they can come back to bite you. As winter and its effects on your village and ability to gather resources are coming.
Just how busy can the settlement get? Well, this is a decently far into the future moment. Everyone's day of work has ended. Their free time is also over. All these villagers are now going to bed. It’s almost like they were gathering to say farewell. As their adventure ends for the day, mine is not.
The villagers need sleep, but you don’t. Sure, I've used sleeping for healing, getting over illness, and sometimes as a time to get warm by a fire. There is no time to sleep. You also don’t need it. Most nights, I'd work through them, trying to fill whatever gaps in duties that did not get filled during the day. I’d sometimes even be on far-off adventures, having to fight my way through the darkness to get back home.
While this game is still in early access, it was not without some annoying bugs. Anything I've run into so far, I could either find a workaround or an alternative. The biggest had been when I got a villager to do the cooking. Anything with eggs caused a lot of issues. For whatever reason, even if people are starving, I'm the only one ever eating eggs. Despite the insane amounts my gathers would collect.
Thankfully, you can go into a building's menu and change its tasks. Once I found out how worthless the village eggs were. I told my food gatherers it should be on the lowest priority and only a small amount. Just enough for me, but I'd rather them gathering a lot of other stuff before a single egg.
Managing tasks of a building is quite important. While some buildings, like those that go out and gather, can be left alone, they will still do something. Things like the workshop where they are crafting items will sit there doing nothing till you tell them what minimum amount of an item you want them to keep in stock.
Their storage is also a bit limited. So, having them make 30 large stone pickaxes is going to create issues. Along with tying up a lot of resources. Since items decay in this game, part of the fun is trying to work out how much of any given item needed by your village you want to be in stock. Nothing is more annoying than when your own pickaxe breaks and you find out there are none in stock.
As far as the building itself goes. It needs to be on flat land, and thankfully, it’s just you clicking on a couple of tiles, and it automatically makes them flat for the building. None of that nonsense of spending insane amounts of time trying to level things for a single building. Granted, it seems it would have been wise to have done a lot of preplanning ahead of time and had an entire area nice and flat. There are also things and events in this game that will get you killed. So, you can’t wait around all day trying to get things perfect either.
Some buildings even have requirements for other stuff being built first. Along with higher-tier materials that need to be refined. You start just needing the basic things like logs, rocks, sticks, and thatch. You end up needing a higher-tier wood that is refined into things like planks later.
Buildings also have upgrade options. These upgrades get built around the exciting structure. So hopefully you don’t make the same mistakes that I have when building stuff far too close to each other. Forcing you to remove a building. To be fair, when I placed down a building, it gave me an idea of just how big, in many cases, the end structure could get.
This game also has some attack events. From there being a blood moon to a yearly invasion. I almost got killed when a giant bear, for no reason, decided to rampage through my village. While I survived, I did end up losing my first villager that night. These attack events occur at night when everyone is usually sleeping, unless you have modified someone's work schedule to have them working during the night.
This is one of those games where there are a lot of little things you end up discovering along the way that you can manage to make something more optimal. Thankfully, for a lot of stuff, if you don’t, it still will perform at a decent level. You might, however, find, for instance, that some workers have traits that are better suited for nighttime activities.
Speaking of needing to manage. After a little while, the spot you put your village down at ends up running out of resources to gather. While you are thankful for the dedication your villagers give you. They are not that bright. You need to place markers on the map of where different gathering types should go to look for resources. At least this can be a way to keep them from wandering into areas that can get them killed. I ended up placing down quite a lot of these different types of markers.
While I did my best not to get killed. After quite some time, that in fact happened. I ended up just replaying from a past save. This game, however, has some interesting options; perhaps one day I'll explore from spawning as a ghost to being reborn.
Perhaps the funniest thing about getting killed. It was not expected. I had so many times when I almost died. I thought now I've put myself in a situation that I'm not getting out of. I did not see it coming, and that sent a shock down my spine the moment it occurred.
I ended up enjoying this one so much that I continued playing it for quite a few hours after I had intended. The nice thing is, this game is in early access, so who knows what could end up getting added over time if anything. There were a couple of areas that needed some improvement. If this is how the game releases, I'd still be thrilled about it.
Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about ASKA.
Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.
Disclosure: This content was written during early access.
