I am a huge fan of most survival crafting games. It's one of my favorite genres.

This game feels like a spreadsheet simulator with graphics.

It's also unclear on what you should be doing in order to survive or how you should go about doing those things.
Resource gathering is unintuitive and tedious.

Even on the easiest setting your hunger & thirst far outpace the meager food options available to begin with.
The game quickly death spirals into starvation, dehydration, incidental injury, and exhaustion.
It becomes a constant scramble just to keep up with basic needs and I wasn't able to secure a position well enough to venture out and progress the story or pursue more advanced crafting recipes which might have helped offset the basic challenges.

I understand how these kinds of games work and I expect an amount of challenge. In fact, I started my first run on normal to experience what the developers intended. Well they intended swift death without a clear way to avoid it. So I reduced the difficulty for my second run. Again, swift death with no clear way to avoid it. I again reduced the difficulty to the minimum option and spent the entire time scrabbling like a newcomer to the survival genre.

Something feels not only deeply unsatisfying about the calculated, spreadsheet-y way you interact with the world by selecting how many resources you want to try to harvest from a given node and the amount of time which will pass during that harvesting, and the amount of durability your tool will suffer, and the chance of injury you may incur.

It's also terribly vague about where to find basic resources or what tools are required to harvest them, or even how you craft some of those tools in the first place.

Overall, this game felt intentionally obtuse and needlessly punishing.
I wish I could refund it but I took too much time trying to give it a fair chance.
Avoid unless you enjoy sweaty try-hard survival experiences.

I'm a bit so-so on this game because obviously it's not the best survival crafter on the market but it isn't bad enough to be worth a thumbs down either. It's pretty much riding the "okay" line for me.

In many ways the game feels like The Long Dark but in a tropical setting. There are many things that are similar to TLD:

- Weather and conditions affects your character.
- Building, reading and crafting takes in-game time.
- You constantly have to tend to your character's needs.
- Very few amount of animals/enemies.
- Immersive
- Dated visuals
- Sense of loneliness ( which is good if you like that )

But in my opinion it's a more complete game than TLD. It hides most of its depth at first and you will be fooled into thinking that there's less content than there actually is. For example, there's more than one island, but the game doesn't show you that right away.

An extra layer of depth was added by the main quest which adds a nice treasure hunt aspect to the game.

Just like in The Long Dark, wild animals are your enemies and are very limited in amounts of species. There's also an infinity of them, as they respawn at the same locations after a cooldown period. I think this was the lazy way of implementing wildlife. It makes me think of grindy MMORPG. The animals quickly become irritating and annoying since you'll always have to kill them even if you did so dozens of times before. You will get so tired of encountering the same animals ( especially the early game badgers ), it's ridiculous.

Player movement is really odd. You move quickly, kinda like in The Forest, but it's more like you're on roller skates since you always seem to slide or roll when you move. You will often try to jump on stuff and "slip" because the movement is so bad. It takes a lot of time to get used to it. I have no idea why they made it like that.

Just like in TLD, you level up different abilities and gain attributes along the way which is a great incentive to keep grinding.

Because it's a pretty grindy game and you will often have to look for something very specific in order to build things and that can become quite tedious over time.

Something that's pretty cool is that items you drop will never disappear. This adds realism to the game and is rather rare to see ( off the top of my head, only Project Zomboid does something similar to that level ). Even when you drop perishable items, they turn into compost.

For me, the game began to be grindier and grindier and at some point I decided to get on the main quest but the game is pretty bad at telling you what to do sometimes, so I often ended up wandering in places I had no reason to be, trying to find very specific things to keep going. The hints and clues the game leaves for you aren't always very precise or informative. The sense of progression in this game is very good at times, and very bad at other times. It definitely can get tedious at some point when you're looking for something and need to go back to a place filled with wild animals you are obligated to kill.

This game will eventually have multiplayer. This is very good news because it'll make it more fun and less grindy. This should've been a thing right off the start but I guess they had other priorities. Seems to me the future online features of the game will definitely enhance the whole gaming experience and may multiply the interest in the game.

For now, I'd say the game is a 6.5/10. Hopefully future updates and multiplayer can make this rating go up a little. It's a rather cheap game, not the best, but can probably satisify your needs if you are a survival/crafting fan and need a new game to test your prepper skills.

More realistic than most survival games. Also less difficult to grind than those other realistic survival games. Fun game. Love the addition of the Ark and the mobile base.