Woodlands

I wanted to give this one a fair hearing. I really did. The survival genre has produced some quietly brilliant underdogs, and I go in hoping every small, unheralded release surprises me. Woodlands does not surprise me. What it does is confirm a pattern that Steam players identified back in 2017 almost immediately after launch: the game's core assets, from its first-person woodland environments to its hunger-and-thirst UI, appear to be pulled wholesale from a Unity asset pack called "Ultimate Survival" that has been repurposed into multiple separate Steam listings. There is no personal stamp here, no handcraft, no intentional design identity. It is a collection of survival systems that exist inside an engine sample project, retitled and sold. On paper the loop is familiar enough. You spawn in a woodland area, manage hunger and thirst meters, gather materials, craft basic tools and weapons, build a fire and a shelter, and contend with hostile enemies who roam the environment. The bones of the genre are there. Collect bones from enemies, hunt animals for meat, keep yourself alive against the clock of your own caloric deficit. If you have played any first-person survival game released between 2013 and 2017, you already know every system present here, because those systems were assembled from the same modular toolkit. The problem is not the genre. Survival crafting as a genre is fine, even when it is simple. The problem is execution and intent. There is no sense that anyone sat with this game and asked what atmosphere it wanted to carry, what pacing would make gathering firewood feel meditative rather than tedious, or what a player is supposed to feel when the fire finally catches in the dark. Those are questions that separate a survival game from a survival demo. Woodlands reads as the latter. The community score on Steam has lingered around 35% positive from a very small pool of reviewers, and the concurrent player count has flatlined to essentially one person at peak. These are not numbers that suggest a hidden gem waiting for the right audience. For the rare person who genuinely has zero survival game experience and wants the most skeletal possible introduction to the genre for close to nothing, the core mechanics do technically function. You can eat, drink, craft, and die. But if that describes you, The Long Dark exists, Green Hell exists, and even the original The Forest exists, all of which deliver the same primal loop with actual craft behind them. Woodlands offers no atmosphere, no distinctive soundscape, no pacing that builds toward anything, and no evidence of a developer voice trying to say something with the medium.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Woodlands.