Wild Planet

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that arrives on Steam with a tiny review count and a handmade feel you can sense through the screen, and Wild Planet is exactly that kind of game. It is a low-poly, top-down open-world survival title where you wash up shipwrecked on a vivid alien planet and slowly turn that hostility into something resembling a home. The loop is familiar: gather, craft, build outposts, push into dungeons, fight the local giant bug population. What lifts it slightly above template is the deliberate tonal choice to keep the whole thing unhurried. This is not a game that throws a hunger bar in your face every thirty seconds and calls it tension. The visual language is minimalist and genuinely pretty in motion. Broad low-poly biomes carry enough colour contrast that wandering from one zone into the next still feels like a small event. Combat is present but never the point - you craft weapons and equipment across a tiered progression system to deal with the indigenous alien creatures, and the dungeon-crawling adds a satisfying vertical dimension to what would otherwise be pure horizontal exploration. Online co-op is available if you want to drag a friend along, which noticeably changes the feel from meditative solo roam to something more social and chaotic. Both modes work, and neither feels tacked on. Now for the honest part. Wild Planet entered Early Access in October 2024 with a mixed reception on Steam, sitting around 63 percent positive across a small review pool. The criticisms are real: community threads flag bugs with crafting stations cycling incorrectly when you move between them, music not playing for some users, and achievement tracking that appears broken for a portion of players. These are not cosmetic issues - they are the friction points that erode a relaxing experience. The team is two people, working under financial pressure, and the roadmap (new biomes, enemies, bosses, expanded crafting) is ambitious relative to the studio size. Full release is targeted for Q2 2026, which is a meaningful stretch of Early Access time still ahead. The game earned recognition at the SwissGames Showcase and Nordic Game Discover Contest before it ever shipped, which tells you the concept has real bones. The question right now is whether the current build gives you enough to justify the wait. If you are the type who finds pleasure in the early, rough chapters of an indie's development and you want something that prioritises atmosphere over aggression, there is something genuinely worth noting here. If you need a complete, polished survival experience today, the bugs and thin content make waiting for later updates the wiser move. Wild Planet is a small, earnest thing that needs more time in the oven - but the recipe itself is sound.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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