(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!
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!