Smalland: Survive the Wilds

Smalland: Survive the Wilds is a survival-crafting game built around one central premise: you are tiny, the world is enormous, and nearly everything in it wants to eat you. Developed by Merge Games and released in early 2024 after a stint in Early Access, it drops you into a lush outdoor environment where blades of grass tower overhead and a common beetle is a legitimate threat. The core loop is familiar to anyone who has played Grounded or Valheim - gather resources, craft gear, build a base, push into harder zones, repeat - but Smalland earns its own identity through its creature-riding system and a surprisingly involved skill progression that gives it just enough RPG texture to keep a character-builder engaged. The RPG layer is light by the standards of something like Outward or even Conan Exiles, but it is there. You allocate stats, unlock abilities, and tailor your playstyle toward melee aggression, ranged kiting, or a mixed build. Weapon variety covers the expected ground - spears, bows, axes, shields - and each material tier changes feel enough to make upgrades feel rewarding rather than purely numerical. The standout mechanic is taming and riding insects: getting a gecko or a dragonfly under your control fundamentally shifts how you move through the world and doubles as a power fantasy that the survival genre does not always deliver. It is one of those systems where the first time it clicks, you sit back and grin. Writing and narrative are not the draw here, to be direct about it. The lore exists, the world has mythological Nordic underpinnings, and there are NPC quest-givers to talk to, but nobody is reading this for the prose. Quests trend toward the fetch-and-craft variety, and if you came from Disco Elysium expecting branching consequence and layered dialogue, you will be disappointed and probably deserve to be for expecting that from a survival game. What the quests do well is serve as pacing guides, nudging you toward new biomes and recipes without being overbearing. The world design does the heavier lifting - discovering that a mossy log hides an entire fungal dungeon, or that a puddle is a traversal puzzle when you are two centimeters tall, lands with genuine delight. Multiplayer is where Smalland really breathes. Solo play is functional but can feel grindy in the mid-game, where resource bottlenecks slow progression to a crawl and the lack of narrative momentum becomes more noticeable. Bring two or three friends and those same stretches become collaborative chaos, with everyone specializing builds and arguing about base placement. The co-op chemistry is the game's strongest asset and the most honest argument for picking it up. Performance on PC is mostly stable, though larger bases and dense biomes can produce frame dips that suggest the engine is working harder than it looks. For survival-RPG fans who want something with a distinct visual hook and a creature-collection angle sitting alongside the usual crafting treadmill, Smalland delivers a solid package. It is not going to reshape how you think about the genre, and the writing will not stick with you, but the scale gimmick never wears out entirely and the build variety holds up respectably into the late game. Just go in knowing this is a crafting sandbox with RPG trim, not the other way around.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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