Ankora: Lost Days

I came into Ankora: Lost Days expecting something close to Summer in Mara's breezy island life, and what I found instead was a stranger, more puzzle-brained thing: a grid-locked alien world where movement itself is the main mechanic. Junior Ranger Mun crash-lands on the planet Ankora, loses her ship parts across a patchwork map of over 100 block-shaped zones, and spends her days figuring out how to physically reach each one. Because Mun cannot jump, traversal is solved through terraforming. You equip a shovel, manually raise or lower the soil underfoot, build wooden stairs out of lumber you chop yourself, and lay bridges over water using resources gathered nearby. It is one of the more unusual ideas in the cozy-survival genre, and for a certain type of player it clicks into something genuinely meditative. The tool set is small but purposeful. The hammer constructs structures, the shovel reshapes terrain, the bow and spike handle the modest combat, and the workbench plus kitchen let you combine gathered materials into new gear and food. Levelling happens passively as you perform actions, which means crafting teaches you new recipes and combat slowly gets less clunky over time. Survival needs are gentle: manage hunger with foraged acorns or cooked meals at a campfire, and keep a tent in your pack for sleeping through the dangerous nights. The game never turns into a sprint to stay alive. It is closer to a low-stakes problem-solving loop, each grid square a small spatial puzzle about how to exit north, south, east, or west. The world earns real warmth from its art direction. Chibig draws visual inspiration from Ghibli productions like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and the palette is bright, layered across biomes that shift from lush forests and open meadows to snowy mountains and desert tiles. The orchestral soundtrack matches that sensibility: airy, unhurried, pleasant without being repetitive. Where the visual craft wobbles is in consistency. Character art across menus, cutscenes, status gauges, and in-world sprites appears drawn by different hands following different briefs, which gently undermines the Ghibli-referencing ambition. The honest frictions are worth naming. The terraforming controls, especially without a gamepad, can feel more fiddly than the puzzles deserve. The map has no dedicated button shortcut, which becomes genuinely frustrating in a game that asks you to navigate constantly. The story involving the Ank clans and their ancient conflict is present but thin, and the main cast rarely rises above functional. Backtracking accumulates, and a subset of players will find the resource loops repetitive well before the credits roll. Critics were split: some found the craft-and-traverse loop hypnotic, others felt the survival label raised expectations the game simply was not designed to meet. What Ankora: Lost Days does best is occupy a niche almost nothing else does. It is not a farming sim, not an action RPG, not a straight survival game. It is a quiet spatial puzzler dressed in alien-nature aesthetics, aimed squarely at players who find joy in methodically filling in a fog-of-war map one wooden staircase at a time. Fans of the Chibig universe who want to meet a younger Mun before the events of Deiland and Summer in Mara will get the most out of it. Everyone else should try the free Prologue on Steam first and ask honestly whether the shovel loop sounds fun or exhausting.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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