This year in Steam survival games

 Fingers crossed this time...

So I'm not a huge fan of the survival genre, I think that's been mentioned here or there around the blog. Though it's not like I've always been that way. Back before the genre really started to blow up in popularity, I thought it to be a really revolutionary and grounding genre type that would prove fruitful enough to build entire games off of. (Boy was I largely wrong about that last part) Here and there some titles popped up that really made good use of survival mechanics in order to fuel a tense gameplay loop of forever securing resources (Don't Starve) or games that slid such mechanics into their game so smoothly that they really just added value to the context of the world rather than presented the mechanics as genuine progression obstacles. (Fallout New Vegas) But then popped up a wholly less commendable type of Survival mode; a genre type game which sought to implement a functional survival mode, and that's it.

Untold numbers of games came together as bare basic survival game clones or injected a survival mode with resource bars that drained far too quickly, thus depriving any meaningful gameplay choices or progression. Take for example, 'We Happy Few'. That was a game which from the very beginning wowed with a beautiful art direction, and eye popping assets, but then when the gameplay started to come together it seemed that the developer's had conflicting ideas on what they wanted to go for. A randomly generated overworld and an aggressive hunger system made the early builds of that game a frustration above all else and the game would go through considerable tweaking before it became the decently regarded title it is today. (And even then the DLCs scrapped the survival elements all together.) Keeping all of this in mind, it's not really a surprise that Survival systems fell out of wide favour long before Bethesda jumped on the train with Fallout 76 and the incredibly punishing Fallout 4 survival mode.

I've grown sour with over-exposure, that much is sure and true. Thus was very much realised in the last Steam Next fest, when out of the several new games I played, the only one I bitterly hated without a shadow of a doubt was The Survivalists, from the creators of The Escapists. (A game which I had, and still do, love for) My issues were the same as they are with most others from this genre bracket; the food management bars were too aggressive, I spent most of the time just trying to secure a replenishment for my bars and all of the things that the game was trying to encourage me to do, exploring and mystery solving, were actively hindered by the unrelenting survival systems. However, seems that I was in the minority because that game has gone on to score high and people seem to love it. I just want to let you know definitively how that's the side of the ladder that I'm on when it comes to survival.

And now onto the Steam Next fest of 2021, and the 2 survival games I stumbled upon here. That scattergun approach to demoing gave me a couple of primarily survival focused games for me to judge the state of modern survival off of. One of which was the demo for a game called Vagabond from Pierre Vigier. As far as I can tell it's this sort of isometric pixel-sprite randomly generated fantasy world wherein players are plopped down and tasked with putting together their own tasks about what they want to do. They interact with villagers using a dialogue system reminiscent of Morrowind, take little tasks to earn money with and slay the odd monster. You can also build a house and furnish it, but I never got to that part of the game. But I must say, playing a whole RPG-style game (I didn't see any skill trees that were readily obvious, so not completely RPG) where you aren't given a main story... why, isn't that a 'GraNd RpG?!' (No, The Wayward Realms, I'm never going to let that go.)

Now looking upon the screenshots of Vagabond I can certainly see some appeal there, from the basic building blocks of a sandbox RPG mixed with that almost Stardew Valley type of art to it, and the promise of house building mixed in which could simulate some of that sleepy routine daily living that I always seem to gravitate to, but as you've likely realised there is a survival game wound up in there too. As far as I can tell, the survival system merely exists as a reason to have you consume some food here and there, maybe even encouragement to grow a farm, but I'm as-of-yet unsure as to if that's even possible. Quite simply, the demo I played was incredibly bare bones, without so much as an intro indicating where I should focus my efforts of playtime, and the meat of the game absolutely wasn't stuffed enough where I could figure out the bulk of the 'fun' by wandering off and doing my own thing.

I don't want to just stamp on this game, because I like the idea of sandbox RPGs and this one seems to have a total solid infrastructure from which to build one, but that RPG doesn't feel anywhere near done yet. The combat is click based and utterly shallow, it made more sense for me to just skirt around enemies and get them stuck on scenery, which was easy to do, rather than actually fight them. The early randomly generated quests weren't even worthy of your cheapest dime store MMO. (Give >Item< to >VillagerName<. Quest done) The randomly generated villages didn't really have any life to them and just felt like NPC wander zones. (Having a pub or village square for the NPCs to congregate within would really beef that up.) The inventory was annoying to use, the Map couldn't zoom in far enough to be useful, map generation placed identical dungeon types right next to one another, clothes and items are better stolen then purchased because no one cares to react when you do, and that survival mode is purposeless right now, it shouldn't have been added this early if at all. What I'm trying to say is that this game is rough. I don't even think it's within a year of coming out in any complete sense. (especially not if, as the developer's name would imply, this is a one man team thing.) But I have a softness for the genre and so I'll file away the name for a year or two when there's a clearer vision in play.

Then we gave- what was this one called again? 'Kingdoms of Atham: Crown of Champions'. Huh, you have to stick that many words onto your game title in order for the thing to stand out and it makes me worry. Especially coupled with that ugly looking logo that always looks almost low res no matter where I see it. So this here is another RPG game that wants to have a bit of the survival systems working up in game's cogs and some high fantasy adventure to buff out the package too. Or at least I think that was the intention, because the execution left me with so many questions I'm unsure of even that. Right away this game went for 3D models, a bold move for any indie studio to attempt, and they look bad. Worse than Daz models. (Which I guess makes sense since most Daz projects use premade models.) Basically, we've got one of those games that looks like the work of early game design students. But it's on Steam, presumably to be sold at some point, for reasons.

I don't really know what the idea was for this game. Because whereas I see the wisp of a Sandbox RPG in Vagabond, this game just looks like a aimless, objectiveless, Stream dumpster game. (And trust me when I say that I don't like using that term) There's a town, and quests, and resource nodes, and I think some building if you care enough to try and find out. Enemies exist in the game, but they don't really have any purpose and you can easily run around them. You can actually hit villagers, but they can't be killed and thus will just chase and try to kill you forever more if you upset them. Combat is as basic as Vagabond. Everything looks awful. The title of the game bares no effect on the game itself. My gripes could, and maybe should, go on endlessly. But I'll just end on the fact we have yet another set of survival bars stuck onto this game for literally no reason.

I didn't get the chance to play that Robin Hood Sherwood Builders game, which has survival and town building elements but I'm told is actually pretty good. So excluding that title which is picking up traction, it feels like the world of survival genre games hasn't move forward too much in the past 10 years or so. That second game was even more barebones than some of the Survival trash I've seen over the years, so it might actually be regressing. Needless to say, I won't be coming around on this stuff anytime soon and I'm also coming away with the realisation that some indie devs probably don't need to be putting together a Demo at any possible opportunity just to get their game out there, especially when that work looks like Atham and now I never want to see another second of it again as long as I live, consequentially. So this would mark the 'underwhelming' part of the whole NEXT festival, but that just means everything else was up from here, baby!