Cute games always get my attention because I’m always hoping to get one of my nieces or nephews interested in something new that I can share with them. The Survivalists has popped into my Steam feed a few times and I’ve also seen a handful of the content creators that I follow playing the game a bit.
I needed something to write about this week and was walking through the list of games that I’d flagged as interesting when I came across this one. Having seen it a few times over the last month or two, I went ahead and took a look at the Steam page to take a harder look at the title, and that’s when it became obvious that I’d be talking about The Survivalists in this week’s article.
The reviews were mixed, which wasn’t a problem for me. Many of the games I like best have mixed reviews from players and my tastes can be a little eclectic. The game started off on a positive note and was practically guaranteed get an automatic recommend for one simple reason, there’s a free demo.
The demo for The Survivalists is one of those really odd situations where it both got me to play the game and still nearly made me pass on writing about it. I’ll get into that more below along with a few things I hope the developers consider as they move forward with the project. Despite a conflicted start, The Survivalists ends up being a game to which I keep returning.
Crafting, survival, exploration, and…. Cute monkeys. The Survivalists is a uniquely fun experience.
Demolition Demo
Any game with a demo gets a nearly automatic recommendation from me. If you can try it out for free, why not give it a rip and see if it’s something you enjoy or not? The problem with The Survivalists is that the demo hints at the things I ended up enjoying about the game but didn’t exactly get me all the way there.
Worse, missing context from the demo actually frustrated me and I nearly walked away from the game over it. It’s really simple stuff and if you know about it walking into the demo, you won’t even remotely have the same problems. I suspect you’ll even manage to see through those minor issues and actually get a good feel for the game through the trial version.
The problem was that I didn’t really know what the demo entailed, or more precisely, where it stopped. Most games will give you limited access to the game’s environment or a limited tech-tree in free versions, and the part missing from The Survivalists is that what comes next bit. That is the teaser piece, saying in effect, “like what you’ve played so far? You’ll love this piece over here that’s included in the full version of the game!”
I think an easier and more intuitive stop for the demo would have just been to not allow players to build their raft.
In The Survivalists, the tech tree just stops. Because of the layout, it’s not obvious that the tree has been abbreviated due to the demo, and instead I found myself thinking there must be some additional workbench or some skill unlock I needed in order to get access to the rest of the tech tree.
Had the game showed some sort of label on the inaccessible tech, I think I’d have been fine. The problem is that those who are playing the demo, haven’t played the release game. Thus, I hadn’t seen how the “normal” tech tree was laid out and didn’t know the broken lines were actually the indications of where the demo stopped progression. Now that I’ve played the full version of the game, it’s obvious what those gaps in the tree are supposed to represent, but at the time of playing, I had no idea about that context as a new player.
I ended up exploring the island and got pretty bored once I’d built everything I could build and couldn’t figure out what I was missing to move on to the next phase of the game. I started to quit, but there was this feeling that it was me missing something and that I might figure it out in the full game, so I broke down and purchased it.
Purchased Positivity
My decision to purchase the game didn’t come exclusively from a gut feeling. There was plenty that I’d already noted to recommend the game, and I felt like several of the key things I look for in a strong title from a smaller studio was there.
For one, the color palette of the game is bright and cheerful in that sort of cell-shaded style that I really like to see from indie studios. As far as custom art goes, I feel it’s an aesthetic choice that maximizes visual appeal for level of effort. Combined with a strong application of color, it’s a style that helps developers tell stories within the story and not spend weeks trying to hammer down light and texture filters. Plus, I’m relatively sure that it’s a graphical design that’s more easily optimized than other more intensive options. Most importantly, it runs well on a wider range of systems and maximizes the potential target base for the game.
Come on!? Who doesn’t want to play a game where you can have tons of pet monkeys in funny hats?
I also felt The Survivalists had managed to succeed on the score, as well. It’s a chiptune soundtrack, but I think it fits the game very nicely. I also happen to think chiptunes are more difficult to do successfully because you can’t hide an inferior score behind brassy French horns and swelling strings. Danny Hey is a relative newcomer to the industry but manages to display creativity and capability as he hits well above his weight with this soundtrack. The score suits the game and directly contributes to the experience enough that I never turned it off while playing.
If a score is boring enough that you turn it off to listen to YouTube in the background while playing, then it’s a fail in my book. It’s even more likely to happen when the medium of choice is chiptune, but Hey successfully passed the mute test by a wide margin. Even his tense battle music and mysterious night music still capture this hint of optimism that I feel the art style of the game equally promotes. This alignment of the creatives is an often missed, and yet very powerful check in the plus column.
Monkey Mechanics
Enough about the subtle successes of the game, you’re likely wanting to know if it’s fun at this point. I think it is and I enjoyed myself a great deal while playing it. I also found it particularly relaxing. While there are raids against your bases, they don’t seem particularly common or really all that problematic if you fail to defend against them.
There are a number of dangers in the game, but none of them feel insurmountable. Even better, I’d say most of them even feel elective. I stumbled into a few situations and died a handful of times to wild beasts that were a bit tough for me at the time, but once I understood a danger, I found it relatively easy to avoid it going forward. That meant that I could work around those problems until I was ready. Being able to selectively face dangers makes them feel infinitely more manageable while still being challenging, and I really liked that mix.
My office is neater than my base, at least until I trained one of my little buddies to help keep the base neat for me.
The core mechanic to the game is the ability to train monkeys that you discover around the island to do various tasks. It’s a whimsical concept that was as fun as it was cute. There were some minor issues. You can drag a box to select multiple monkeys, which too easily selects some you don’t want and clears their current orders somethings. I’d rather control-click to select multiple critters and feel that’d resolve the minor frustration.
I also had occasional problems training the monkeys to do the specific task I wanted them to do or just knowing what they’d do once trained. For instance, training one to pickup resources and put them into a box will have the little guy running halfway across the map to pickup pebbles to add to a box that already has hundreds. Despite the minor frustrations, a full base of monkeys running to and fro to accomplish a dozen small tasks is a joyful site to behold. Good luck not laughing, especially after you’ve equipped them with a myriad of funny hats.
The system of spreading resources across multiple islands and requiring the player to establish multiple forward operating bases in developing a network of resource collection and processing capabilities is not a new idea. Plenty of other games do something similar, but The Survivalists takes that relatively common idea and elevates it through the application of simian support.
There is danger in The Survivalists, but it’s also easily avoided once you know it’s there.
Red’s Read
I liked the base building aspect of this game and also the pseudo tower defense component of the game as well. It lends a bit of dynamic fun to the game that keeps things interesting. Along with exploration and some hints of resource management, The Survivalists ends up being a really cute game with a lot more to offer than I had expected as I was coming into it last week.
There were a lot of little systems that all tie together really nicely to make a really enjoyable experience, and I’m looking forward to introducing some of the kids to it. It’s cute, it’s fun, and I like that there’s also a lot of tangential learning through it in the form of the resource management and the monkey-helper system. In fact, I kind of feel that the monkeys could be a good primer for teaching programming as each effectively behaves like a subroutine.
As far as whether readers should look into the game or not, it’s an easy yes. Just go into the demo knowing that you’re not missing anything, the breaks in the skill tree are just where you get cut off if you’re not on the paid version of the game. I think the demo gives you a modest taste of the whole experience, but because you don’t get off the initial island in that demo, there’s still a lot more to explore.
I also think this’ll be a very easy game to update over time, so I suspect that there’ll be a lot of content coming down the road if The Survivalists is as successful as I expect and hope it’ll be. I feel they’re already in a great spot with the game and most of my current complaints are really related to very simple contextual gripes and better labeling would address nearly all of them.
In the meantime, check the free demo out for yourself and let me know what you all think. If you’ve got kids and are looking for something wholesome to play with them, then I’d doubly encourage you to give it a shot. The game does have a co-op mode and I think it has enough of the cuteness factor to overcome any learning curve difficulties. I’m always interested in what you readers think though, so let me know.
