Soulmask

I usually bounce off survival crafting games hard. Give me a lobby shooter and I am fine, but the genre has always felt like a job application. Soulmask earns a different reaction, at least for a while. The core hook is genuinely novel: you are not a character so much as a consciousness. You wear an ancient mask, recruit tribespeople by knocking them out and dragging them back to camp, and then possess any of them at will to use their individual skill sets in combat or exploration. Your starting character is the weakest unit you own. Every tribesman you capture is a potential upgrade, and hunting down red-named Legendary tribespeople to use as talent donors in the Training Ground becomes its own obsessive mini-game well before you hit mid-game. The combat runs on nine weapon classes and 88 distinct weapon skills, with an over-the-shoulder system that flows cleanly between strikes and maneuvers. It is not elite-tier in terms of feel, but it is responsive enough that direct fighting stays engaging for the first dozen hours. Where it starts to hollow out is exactly where you would expect: once your tribe is competent enough, companions do most of the heavy lifting. Boss fights can devolve into posting your warriors and stepping back with a bow. The companion AI in 1.0 is meaningfully better than early access ever was, with the new Tribesman Assignments system letting fighters, harvesters, and crafters fill idle time automatically rather than standing around a campfire doing nothing. But the flip side is that a well-built tribe can make you feel like a middle manager watching subordinates earn your victories. PVP on official servers is a separate conversation, and not a flattering one. Reports of exploiters bypassing base protections and wiping entire servers worth of progress are persistent enough to be a pattern, not just bad luck. If competitive play is what you came for, private servers with a curated group is the only reliable path here. The over-200 customizable server settings are genuinely useful for dialing in the pace, and a small friend group running their own instance of Soulmask is probably the game's best version. The 1.0 launch brought three distinct modes, Tribe Mode for the automation obsessives, Warrior Mode for combat-first players, and Survival Mode for genre purists, which does a lot to stop the experience from being one-size-fits-none. The Shifting Sands Egyptian biome doubles the available world and introduces airships, new bosses including Sobek and Anubis encounters, plus cross-biome logistics that genuinely stress-test late-game tribe management in ways the jungle biome alone never could. Tribespeople can be stationed aboard airships, which turns fixed-base defense into a mobile civilization problem and is the most interesting thing the game does at the high end. The crafting queue logic still has a documented bug where a single blocked job at the top of a station queue freezes everything below it, and the tooltip and localization gaps mean you will be alt-tabbing to community wikis for answers that the UI should just tell you. Both issues have been there since early access. Neither is a dealbreaker, but they signal a studio that prioritizes content drops over UX polish. Soulmask lands in the better half of its genre with some ideas that genuinely separate it from the Conan and Valheim comparisons reviewers keep reaching for. The possession mechanic alone is worth seeing. Just go in knowing that official PVP servers are a gamble, the crafting systems reward patience over instinct, and the most interesting version of this game involves a few friends, a private server with tweaked settings, and enough time to actually build the automated civilization the whole thing is designed around. Fred, Scout Team