AWAY: The Survival Series

I want to love this one, and that wanting is itself telling. AWAY: The Survival Series carries a concept so quietly original that I kept rooting for it even as it stumbled. You play as a young sugar glider joey on a post-human Earth, your every move narrated in calm, Attenborough-adjacent tones while a lush forest breathes around you. The conceit works, probably more than it deserves to. The narration is reactive and well-timed, the soundtrack composed by Planet Earth II's Mike Raznick shifts from warm and exploratory to tense in a way that genuinely earns its documentary lineage, and when you catch a proper glide arc between canopy branches, there's a fleeting moment of something close to magic. Those moments exist. I have to be honest that they're the minority. The two main modes, a linear story mode running roughly five hours and a separate exploration mode where you can switch between other creatures and hunt down scattered lore logs, are both hobbled by the same core problem: the controls fight you. Ground movement is sluggish and imprecise, gliding suffers from a slow turn radius that turns clean traversal into a lottery, and the camera has a stubborn habit of losing its angle at the worst moments, sending your little marsupial facing entirely the wrong direction mid-platforming sequence. Combat against smaller predators like scorpions, spiders, and snakes is handled with claw and bite attacks, while larger threats such as wolves and foxes require stealth or evasion, which is a nice design instinct. In practice the stealth sections land somewhere between irritating and funny, with laggy inputs making the quick-time events feel arbitrary. One review I came across put it plainly: the game feels like it shipped in early access state despite being a full release, and three years on, the community consensus on Steam sits right at that polarising mixed line. What genuinely holds up is the atmosphere that surrounds all of that friction. The post-human world, where humanity has collapsed under an event called the Shift and nature has reclaimed everything, gives the environments a melancholic, overgrown beauty. The hologram collectibles scattered in exploration mode, little remnants of the world that was, are worth finding if you can tolerate the controls long enough. The sugar glider model itself is rendered with real care and affection. Breaking Walls, a Montreal indie studio built by AAA veterans, poured five years into this project, and you can feel the sincerity in every frame. It just needed more time in playtesting. Who is this for, then? Honestly, it's for someone who watches nature documentaries with the same reverence I do and wants even a rough, unpolished translation of that feeling into an interactive space. Animal lovers with patience, players who can forgive janky movement when the mood is right, or anyone picking this up at a significant discount who just wants a short, strange, atmospheric thing to sit with for an evening. If you go in expecting tight 3D platformer mechanics or satisfying combat, you will leave frustrated. If you go in expecting a vibe, a soundscape, a family story told through the eyes of a tiny gliding marsupial against a world quietly reclaiming itself, you might find something worth finishing. Just save often and keep your expectations on the ground, even when your glider refuses to stay there.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on AWAY: The Survival Series.