(Reviewing the single player vanilla survival experience in 2023)

There's a certain charm to how difficult and fragile it is to progress when doing survival - you have to be so conservative with your runs and building beds/etc, trying to descend into caves is really fraught, it's so hard to find minerals, stuff is placed in the most awful places (iron on ceilings), combat is so broken and unbalanced, biomes seem to go on forever. Honestly the impression single player vanilla gives me is basically a tech demo with almost zero game design sense. It's interesting to think about the generations of games that built upon or were influenced by this game as a result. Dragon Quest Builders, Death Stranding...

Overall it's a little funny the single player survival mode even exists? Obviously the real draw with this game is the mods, the multiplayer. As a friend put it, the base game is like "rice". It sort of feels like Survival is there because "why not", but it's funny how the combat, movement, resource balance and map sizes feel like a broken (but charming) prototype in a lot of ways.

As a game designer playing this makes you think "this kind of survival sure is an interesting texture, I wonder how it would feel if it was some other way..."

Nevertheless it's still a super memorable game..4 stars it is!

yeah so I feel like people are too scared now to actually talk critically about this game because its you know, mineycrafta the funny internet game that can do no harm but:

this game has gotten worse, and I feel like not enough people are talking about it. So many more useless items, so much bloat, so much unnesscary and forgettable things. The only reason why this game isn't actual hell for anybody new to the game is because the internet exists, and everybody has either played the game before or knows the ins and out of it. The game now does a terrible job at communicating anything to the player. This worked from 20-Whenever the game came out to like 2014 because the game was built off the magic of not knowing anything. But now theres so much fluff and bulk to this that if anybody new were to play this game they would have a fucking heart attack trying to figure it out. Also its lost a lot of its charm. And im not just saying that because of the passage of time. I didn't play this game in 2011 or anything, I played it in 2017. And all of these problems still existed in 2017. Its only when I actually went back and played the older versions did I put this all together.

I don't think Minecraft is necessarily a bad game now, cause I still think its pretty neato. But like. This is kind of getting ridiculous now. Its bloated to hell and back, still built off the design of the original build which is IMPOSSIBLE to still use today, and so poorly communicates anything to player. Yeah I don't think its perfect no more.

Also the combats terrible now and most worlds end up becoming a grind into becoming a Villager warlord and just grinding for books. Like, why did we design the game like this? I think thats stupid, and I don't like that design direction. Its a fucking open world game not a rpg.