The Survivalists

My first few hours with The Survivalists felt like finding a hand-drawn map in a thrift store, charming, a little cryptic, and quietly promising something larger than it first lets on. You wash up on a procedurally generated island, punch some pebbles together into a hand axe, and then the game more or less steps back and leaves you to figure out what comes next. That open-ended start is both its most endearing quality and its most honest flaw: the early game is genuinely free to a fault, and some players will stall out before finding their footing. If you push past the initial drift, though, you find a surprisingly layered sandbox built around crafting trees that stretch from grass bedrolls and palm-leaf bowls all the way up to forged weapons, blown glass, and elaborate jungle mansions. The real centrepiece is the Mimic System, where you tame wild monkeys using bananas and then teach them tasks by performing those tasks yourself while they watch. In theory this is delightful and it frequently is: watching a trained monkey army chop timber, haul resources into chests, and hold a perimeter against goblin raids carries a low-key absurdist joy that nothing else in the genre quite replicates. In practice, the monkey AI is clunky enough to occasionally turn that joy into friction. Monkeys clump together, mis-select when you click near trees, and combat-trained ones will stand still waiting for your input even while enemies are chewing through your base. It is the game's defining tension: the best idea in the build, imperfectly realised. Combat sits closer to a top-down Zelda than a proper survival sim. You roll to dodge, manage a stamina meter, and swap between melee and a bow-and-arrow system that requires you to aim a target area on the ground. Death is lenient, respawn at your last save point, retrieve your dropped items, which keeps the tone gentle rather than tense. Hardcore survival fans will find this toothless. That is also exactly what makes it the right pick if Don't Starve Together has historically broken up your friend group. Orc raids periodically test your base defences, temples and labyrinths hold the rarest loot, and a Mysterious Stranger hands out quests that push exploration forward. Build a raft, sail to a new procedurally generated biome, repeat. The loop is modest but it holds together for a solid fifteen to twenty hours, longer with co-op. Audiovisually, the game earns real praise. The pixel art reads with surprising depth for its resolution, and the soundtrack shifts register quietly to match what is happening around you, calm and almost pastoral during base-building, unsettling when a raid is inbound. The sound design layers in tropical ambience, animal calls, and tool sounds with real care, the kind of detail that suggests someone on the team genuinely loved the atmosphere they were constructing. The Escapists lineage is visible in the art DNA but the palette is warmer, airier, and more alive. Where the game runs into the ceiling of its 69 Metacritic score is depth. Endgame gear arrives faster than it should, recipes unlock quickly, and once you have a capable monkey workforce the resource grind loses its texture. The lack of clear long-term milestones beyond escaping the island means the sandbox can start to feel hollow right when it should feel most abundant. Co-op with two to four players papers over almost all of this, distributing the labour, turning the monkey micromanagement into shared comedy, and making the temple raids genuinely tense. Solo players with patience will still find a lot to enjoy, but the game clearly imagines itself being played with company.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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