Aska’s, an upcoming survival crafting co-op game headed to Steam Early Access on June 20th, seeks to meld the genre's mainstays with those of a colony sim. The team, taking inspirations from Viking myth as well as Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, aims to bring a compelling twist on the survival formula.
You and three other players are shipwrecked on an island after angering the gods, with Aska’s developer Sand Sailor Studio stating they took inspiration from the Fall of Numenor from The Akallabeth in The Silmarillion. The aim isn’t just to survive the wilds, but to build a thriving settlement.
This is the main conceit of pretty much every survival game. Survive the elements, monsters, and more while you build up your own house, village, fortress - whichever. However, the wrinkle with Aska is the colony sim aspect. It’s not just the players who will inhabit this village, but NPC villagers that all have tasks, routines and more, building your settlement into a vibrant town to return to each night.
It’s not just you surviving the wilderness either, as the developers told us in a demo last week that the villagers themselves will have the same survival loop. So they’ll need to eat, drink, sleep, and more to survive. It all turns into this blend that, if successful, creates vibrant villages to inhabit and brings more life to Aska’s world.
At the heart of each village is the Eye of Odin, which, when fueled, summons villagers, brings back lost ones, and more. Each villager will also have a specialization, so some will be good at foraging for food, while others are better at combat out the gate. It’s more than a standard city builder: you’ll be responsible for assigning your villagers to shelters to sleep and stations to work at while you’re away. Some villagers will even follow you into combat, helping to tackle the dangers of this new world.
In a way, this isn’t a traditional city builder - Aska’s devs describe it more like a colony or tribe builder. The developers say that these villagers will grow, get stronger and become central characters in your story. Villager happiness, as well as overall village happiness are aspects players will need to keep in mind during their journey.
The more your villager spends doing their task, the better they get at the job. So having your villagers focus on what they are good at is key to achieving the best results for your village. The blacksmith will get better with time, your woodcutters will become more proficient - and even your warriors will get more skilled in combat.
These villagers can also die, from things like starvation or in combat - which means you can lose that institutionalized memory you’ve spent time cultivating as well. It’s an exciting-sounding system.
In my time with Aska, I wasn’t sure how this idea would meld together in practice. Jumping into the beta over the last week, I struggled to really find the fun throughout all of this.
I have thousands of hours in survival crafting games, from ARK: Survival Evolved, ATLAS, Conan Exiles, Valheim - the list goes on. The core crafting loop, grinding for materials and building up my own structures, towns and more - it’s one that I’m drawn to in all of these games.
Aska’s was one where I was almost immediately put off from the get-go, however. Collecting wood to make my first structures wasn’t a simple matter of grabbing sticks and rocks, crafting a hatchet, and then chopping down the nearest tree. Like Pax Dei, another survival crafting co-op game on the horizon, the crafting from the get-go felt needlessly convoluted.
I don’t mind complexity. But complexity, for complexity’s sake, saps my fun. When trying to figure out how to build my first structure, I was confused by the requirements, and without adequate tooltips, it took me entirely too long to figure it out.
Even after chopping down my first Soft Fir tree, I was confused by the lack of “long sticks” needed to build my shelter - only to find out this is what Aska calls the multiple logs the tree breaks down into that I processed, thinking it was just part of the process.
Additionally, the game doesn’t quite tell you that you can’t put these items into your inventory—you have to carry them to the job site and then “apply” them to the blueprint hovering there. Many buildings, even the simplest lean-to huts, require multiple stages to build.
Structures start out with you leveling the ground, which, thankfully, Aska does for you with a click of a button near the plot - though larger buildings require more area to be leveled. Once that’s done, it came time to actually add the resources to the structure to build it, from simple sticks, long sticks, fiber, and more early on. Once the resources are added, you’ll use the hammer to “build” that stage - only to be met with more requirements and another round of building to complete.
As a result, it can take quite a bit of time to get started, especially as some of the larger resources you can only carry one of at a time. There are simply too many steps and hurdles to making early progress, and as a result after my first thirty minutes I was already ready to quit for the day.
I do appreciate, though, that you really don’t need the resources in your inventory when you go to build the structure, meaning it’s a good way to plan out where things will go in your village ahead of time. Additionally, pressing “Z” on the keyboard would highlight resources, both partially harvested and ready to process, which was a lifesaver sometimes when sticks, bark and other items would blend into the forest floor below.
Gathering resources, especially rocks and the magical fuel used to power the Eye of Odin, can take entirely too long, and in the end, not really give many resources. It took full-on minutes to grind down one of the many magical rocks hiding the Odin fuel within, only for two of the resources to be spat out in the end. Early tools are also incredibly weak, and I was burning pickaxes in one large rock so quickly that I was making multiple pickaxes at a time just to keep moving. Unless I’m blind there was no way to just repair my tools, either, meaning I was just wasting valuable inventory space to carry multiple copies of a tool just to get through one task.
Things get better once you have your first villager. Set up a building to construct and they will usually get to work harvesting resources, bringing them to the plot and, if left to their own devices, actually finishing the job. However, there were also times when the villagers would tell me they couldn’t complete a job because there weren’t any sticks around - when we were sitting in the ruins of a newly felled tree, the ground covered in fresh sticks for the taking.
Combat did have some meatiness to it, and I could see myself focusing my efforts there when Aska hits early access. This is where the colony aspect of the survival co-op RPG comes into play - I don’t find the crafting particularly compelling in this game, but one of my friends might.
With the help of villagers, it might just scratch that itch so well for a group member that all I need to focus on is hunting, foraging, and keeping the village safe. I feel that multiplayer is where Aska will come into its own as roles are assigned and the convoluted building and crafting starts to fall less on the shoulders of one person and more on the collective.
Unfortunately, during my time in the beta I was unable to get any multiplayer games going to really test this, but it’s not hard to see how it can be a boon. More people, whether they are real or your villager sims, can make the loop easier.
I’m also interested to see how Aska’s world and overarching narrative develops. The game looks beautiful, it’s low-fantasy, Norse inspired world brimming with life. Seeing how a more fully fleshed-out town works, as well as how villager party groups work in practice, is also intriguing. Having one or two players in the group round up the warriors to roam in a Warband should be a much different experience than leading a resource gathering expedition with your villagers, assigning them specific tasks while on the prowl.
There is potential here - it just needs refinement to make it feel compelling early on and not necessarily an unrewarding grind - which is how I came away feeling after my time in Aska.
It’s still early, though, and given a large beta just concluded, the team at Thunderful and San Sailor Studio will have time to take the feedback from its testers and apply it to make the Aska experience as good as it can be for its June 20th Early Access launch.
Despite not necessarily enjoying my time in Aska, I’m still interested in checking it out when it hits Steam this summer. It’s an intriguing premise, and the mix of a colony sim and survival game should be explored further with more time to devote to it after launch, especially with a couple of friends along for the ride.
