CrossWorlds: Escape

Greetings everyone! Played this game first time at my friend's place (first time in 2020), Game is just awesome and underrated. If dev is alive this game should be modifed and updated. Probably somebody need to promote it a bit...It looks like poor graphics and is probably quite buggy...But still it's really nice! Good for listening some music...almost no music in game...ANd it's meditative. As dark souls fan in past, i find this quite enjoyable...Looks like i can't sleep in beds IN-GAME now lol....Maybe because i moved "saved games" from another PC, sleeping bags still fulfill their purpose. P.s. I'll see what happens if i start new game or maybe it'll just selfFix in time.

Brilliant, Brutal, and Rewarding.

Is this a "souls-like" survival game? Maybe.

This game is one of the only survival games to actually challenge your intellect, by having a harsh, wild, deadly AF world but also giving you the reasonable tools/abilities to try and survive it. For realism, there are SEASONS. This means, when winter is coming...WINTER IS COMING. All the terrain, overtime, visibly changes and it looks awesome. Plants that once would bear fruit, will become fruitless clusters of barren wooden husks; that lovely stream you got water from, or lake you fished from? FROZEN. So it actually compels you to harvest resources to craft storage items (containers for water, crates for other stuff) and start storing what you need before it arrives. Meat? It goes bad. So you have to craft a smoker to smoke the fish and meat. You also need shelter. The weather FX are great and weather is deadly, you will freeze to death in winter, so harvest some skins/fur, and work on transitioning it in to materials for clothes. This game is brutal. You don't just get a few pieces of fur and POOF, here is your new coat. No, it has to be treated and you need to craft a rack to dry it out wait and stuff and do this to many pieces before you have enough to make more clothes (kind of pain though).

You can't carry everything. So how to you get by? Think. THINK.

This game challenges you to seriously think about how you play survival games and outthink it's environment to endure.
It's long, and very hard. If you make it through a winter, you've basically "beat" the game. You've made it. You've done well. Now Wash. Rinse. Repeat. There is still more to do, more you can do for yourself to improve and become stronger, and start exploring the mysterious of the world, like wth is the volcano yonder? Or the other biomes? What are those creatures with their own villages? Are they friendly? They don't look it...are you ready to check it out and able to bug-out or stand your ground if they are hostile? Why are there more modern looking houses in the distance? What's going on with those? Is it safe?

This game challenges the player to improvise, overcome, and adapt. Unlike most survival games you follow the playbook of harvest this/that, build a campfire, primitive tools and pretty easy to get through a day.

You really have to think in this game.

You can build anything anywhere but is that wise?

Very difficult, grueling, and feels great when you come up with a way to overcome a challenge.
If you die, you respawn, but way far away and have to run back to your you died to get your things. Or just run back to your camp or base if it's too risky to die again. So it's fair in you have a chance and choice what to do.

In my game, it was rough. Almost uninstalled. Stuck it out. Found a house that had tools and stuff I could use. What incredible luck. Exploration and running from everything paid off. But it was not easy. I worked on build my own actual base next to it. I can't carry everything so I created a network or small houses/shacks with storage, so I could run back and forth between and move things around my "network" and basics so I could use as safehouses against dangerous elements and wildlife if needed, with basic survival materials and supplies just in case. It followed a nice stream with wild-growing editable items along the way. Smart! I decided to build my official main base/house/someday mansion, near the lake the stream emptied into it.

It was in a nice spot, near many resources.
I created crates in strategic areas too, so any game from my hunting I could not carry it all back, I could store materials in these. Smart!

Unfortunately, it was near an areas where giant monster snakes spawn/respawn. They attack my house and try to get it.
They bite hard, can poison you, and you can die. Solution? Learn how to fight snakes. I came close to death 2 or 3 times in battling giant snakes. They have unique attack/movements I studied and was able to get good and learning and when to strike them. Incredibly stressful! But rewarding: I destroy the snakes, and I harvest their meat which is really good game meat. I'm eating even better now. I build a fence around my house, still not totally snake proof but as they keep showing up now and again, it's a steady supply of food until the lake unfreezes and I can fish again (you can still get water from the ice so as not to die from thirst). Smart! Rewarding! Easy? HECK NO. As I said, incredibly stressful. Brutally stressful. But I overcame this challange and adapted well. "Those snakes want a war? WANNA WAR?! sO bE iT I will slAy U noW!"

Winter is leaving. That was rough. It will get easier now. I have secured my humble fortress and will become even more powerful in the new year.

GREAT GAME.

Game was abandoned and "released" unfinished. Lots of bugs, multiplayer isn't really functional. Added 'crafting timers' at one point, which I never understand this, (PS this mechanic was meant for multiplayer games like Rust, etc.) So unless you can get it for sale for a couple bucks, don't bother.

Sadly it had a lot of potential, the seasons and everything was neat, but I stopped having fun when the crafting timer mechanic, and a lot of bugs came up, and it just became more grindy for no good reason. Just another game I wish bought for myself and my wife to play co-op that isn't able to be played together. =/

I have had Crossworlds Escape for awhile in my library and enjoy the game and still revisit and play. Game has come along way since first being introduced to Steam and is unique compared to other similar games and may not be for everyone. You can set game mechanics before you play to a certain extend like length of seasons/days, and food water consume rates. There are other factions in the world you can try and avoid but will eventually have some contact with them. And being curious they may come look for you at your base if you have one build so like most survival games being prepared is a good idea. If your into any type of open world survival , resource gathering and planning ahead for seasonal changes and exploring you may like to give this title a chance with open mind and have fun. Happy Gaming

I won't recommend this until the problem of freezing is solved. After 15 to 20 minutes the game starts to stutter and after a while it freezes. Only thing helps is restarting the whole game. And rinse and repeat.

Until it's fixed this game is very much unplayable.

I had given this game a good review but have sense changed it for many reasons.

It's actually a good game for the exception who ever the developer is has left the building and is not returning. With all the time that has passed from when it was released many things could have been fixed, more content added and more people purchasing and playing. Not sure why steam allow these things to occur and the game to be sold to this day.

So I like this game and have been trying to play and enjoy. As i struggle through the many things that need to be adjusted or fixed greatly slow me down but i push forward, it's a survival game after all correct?

So i finally get enough stuff to craft the roof for my base and after the grind to do so I come to find out the pitched roof only snaps to the walls that have windows, very painful. Also noticed the windowed walls are a different size then the regular walls with no windows and are taller and in a different position and don't snap into place correctly. It's not like the game is totally unplayable it just lacks detail, the food water drain is way to fast and you find yourself spending most of your time trying to get water and food which leaves you next to no time to gather matts to build and craft.

By the time you cut down a few trees and craft some planks it's dark again because the time of day goes by like in no time at all. You can't keep playing because shortly you will need food and you can't hunt in the dark with a bow. So you have to sleep. So from what i experienced your day starts and you must hunt and kill a deer, by the time you find a deer, kill it, cook the meat, get water you have to literally rush off to to get wood to make planks. By the time you do all this and get two or three trees cut down it's dark or getting dark and you can't see jack!

So bottom line is the game is really unbalanced and a total struggle just to do a few things to progress, I spend most of my time getting food and cutting down trees and sleeping. It's repetitive and after a few hours of game play gets old super quick. I think if the days were more like 30 minutes and then night for like 20 minutes with the ability to sleep in your tent and wake up in the am would be a huge improvement. Extending the food and water timers and fixing the building of structures so the roof actually works etc.etc. i am done playing this game because it clearly seems abandoned and I would not suggest purchasing this unless you actually see updates and bug fixes and i am not referring to just one update or the last update which wasn't really an update at all, i am talking seeing actual progress over a period of time.
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Developer response:
lex [developer] Posted: Mar 20, 2020 @ 5:21pm
Hello. We recently released the game from early access. Previous patches have improved performance, completed the first chapter of the story line, added new items and changed some of the old ones. Perhaps this time you like the game more, and you change your mind about it?

If you look through all the negative reviews you see one thing, the developers copy and pasted the same generic reply to ever single review, very lazy and if i am not mistaken i bet he never even took the time to actually read through all of them.

I have mixed feelings about this game. Overall I do like it but the choppy game play kills it for me. I tried a reinstall, adjusting settings in game and PC, no other games do this for my PC. Was hoping that was fixed after the updates but doesn't look like it. If that was resolved I would recommend this game, it is interesting.

Here's an idea of easy mode.
Day 1: Died from a wolf, died from a troll creature, died from an armadillo thing, died from falling, died from a wolf TWICE trying to retrieve my stuff. Still never even managed to put down a single foundation.

Second attempt at playing: Managed to build a basic house that took half a forest to get the bark, got some clothes that gave me practically no protection at all but required me to deforest the other half of the map to make the cloth.
Went out looking for water. Died from a wolf, died again trying to get back to retrieve my stuff from a spider. Died a third time from an armadillo thing, died a fourth time from a troll. Still never retrieved my stuff and now looking forward to deforesting half the forest to make new clothes that give me no protection again.

If you like a game where you die a lot and constantly lose all your stuff, that you spent ages making and stuff you spent ages trying to find, then die a lot trying to retrieve it because you randomly respawn a thousand miles from where you died, despite having a respawn statue that is SUPPOSED to respawn you where you place it, This is the game you want.
As I said above, that was on EASY settings because I was just trying to learn the game. I'd hate to think what it would be like on normal or hard.

I would not recommend this game t anyone until they add some reasonable protection from damage with the clothes that take forever to make. Not to mention some way to protect yourself at close range other than a spear that only tickles the enemies to death.

Then you have the freezing, just doing nothing at all and the game locks up for a minute or more at a time for no apparent reason. The longer you play, the more frequently it locks up until it's impossible to play at all between freezes.
Spend ages building a basic shelter, only to have it load somewhere up in the sky when you load the game again.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1904798452

It also keeps mentioning the magical altar with no indication of where it is. Without it, you can't ressurect your companion nor can you activate any skills.

NOTE:
Dev rarely, if ever, responds on the Steam forums. Despite several bugs being reported, no response from the dev or patches have been seen. Buy at your own risk.

The Developer copy/pasted every negative review with the same message, so I'd still skip the game. I mean, if they can't bother to respond to their critics, the game can't have improved much, right?


TLDR; I'm playing it for now, but I don't think you should.

Well this game is a mixed bag for me. There are some nice elements but nearly all of them are tied up behind way too much of a time sink. A couple examples: Let's say you've just started the game and you want to place a couple chests to store your gear. Okay, chests are made from planks and those come from wood which comes from trees, bushes and the ground. To chop down one tree takes about 30 seconds. Let's say you were lucky and got enough wood (16 pieces) to make the planks. The planks are made one at a time and each plank takes 15 seconds to make. That's 4 minutes of your real life wasted while watching a timer. Not only that, planks aren't the only item needed to make a chest. You'll need clay too. Clay may or may not be found by your trees, so you may need to walk to a nearby lake/pond/river.

If you add up all the time consuming tasks it takes about 23 real-time hours to build a complete base. The game could be fun if the developer ever massively streamlines all of the processes. You do eventually build items that makes some of the tasks a little easier, but I find the game to be way too frustrating, at this time, to recommend.

The game world is supposedly huge, but there really isn't much to it; at least at this time. You've got a few monsters, several wildlife predators and game animals. There is the occasional walled town of monsters, caves, houses, etc but all of them just contain the same stuff you can find or make yourself. No reason to ever enter one of these unless you just want to fight. There are no levels or skill increases so there is no incentive to ever fight anything unless you just want to make food or relieve boredom. The game needs loot that isn't tied to crafting. If there is a story to the game, it is so vague as to be meaningless. The whole goal of the game seems too be build a structure to survive the seasons, repeat, repeat, repeat.

All of that said, I'm still playing it even with all of the negatives. Right now the game just isn't accessible to the average player. It requires too much of a time commitment for the amount of fun in return.

I like it, it has a lot going for it .
> It is difficult getting oriented to the UI .

> The inventory could be streamlined but for now it works.

> Performance is an ongoing issue (as with all games that use Unity Engine)

> The landscape scenery has a lot of options for adjustments on the graphics, but lackluster in the planning of the biomes.
Are the reasons for the patterned biomes some kind of "Lore Related" future puzzle to unlock before you can escape the
Crossworlds? There must be a reason for the title, hmmm; something to speculate about.

>The resurrection aspect of this game is real frustrating for me and keeping a statue ready if you want to respawn at your
base otherwise...you never know where in the map you appear. I do feel however, that an option to keep your loot or have
it drop where you die could add to this game. A persistent bug keeps the Icon of your loot invisible so you never find it in
time because the delay factor happens too soon.

> I am a gamer that does not like decay factors implemented in games. The arrows disappear when they should just lay
there or automatically go into inventory as you loot your animals and NPC rats and goblins.I am fortunate to have a
beastie rig so the option for decay factor on or off would be ideal for gamers like myself.

I am on my 5th or 6th startover and looking forward to playing another 100 hours to see what happens ! I broke my others LOL

Update:
I started over and am finding the game easier to navigate.
Graphics are wonderful - Seasons changing is the addicting aspect of this game it really makes you think of what to do to get ready for winter. Reaching most of the achievements are easy to get seeings how dying is easy to do LOL

Get this game when you can the Devs are all over the Bug fixing as soon as someone reports one. Good communication between the Devs and the Community at this point.
A good game takes years to perfect just remember Skyrim was 10 years in the making and I think Crossworlds is going to be at least half that before the Devs release the full version.

This game is really enjoyable. The graphics are good and I really like the scenery. I have played this game in two ways. In the first one I mainly concentrated on building a base and stocking up stuff for worse times and basically played as a survivor. I explored some parts but focused more on surviving than action. The other way I played I quickly build some small and medium safe bases in different locations and roamed the land looking for.....whatever. I went into caves, fought goblin settlements and explored as much as I could. I died quite often, but I learned to travel light at to get equiped with the most important things quickly.

So this can be both a slow playing game and a more adventurous one, depending on what you like. It is different to many games in the same genre, and I am really looking forward to experience further development. It is really promising and I haven't felt as caught up in the development since the first six months of LiF back in 2014. It went tits up after that, of course, but that's another story. Crossworlds are a bit less ambitious and have more realistic goals.

I can fully recommend it to anyone who like the survival genre and want to try something with a bit of a different vibe.

Have a nice day.

- Forfal

The initial feeling is that this is an old school survival game.
It allows co-op game-play, which I didn't tested yet.
It is made on UE4 Engine.

Features I discovered so far

• the game allows to build a glider but is not easy to fly with it. I guess developers glide in real life. I don't. The direction of wind is also shown, beside health, thirst and other info. See:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1465786511
  
  
• you have to make a house and defend it when the mobs attack every 5 days.
  
  
• fight and hunting:
  [list]
  
• aggressive NPCs tries to flee when health is low. Run to hit them before they go far. Else they come back once they healed.
  
• the fight with single melee NPCs in easy:
  [list]
  
• step forward to block npc advance and hit with pike
  
• move backward out of range and npc will miss. Repeat.
  

This game has huge potential, but it is not for casual players, it is an unforgiving survival game where mistakes are punished pretty hard especially in winter where you currently can end up in a death loop if you respawn in a random location after dying, then it is close to impossible to reach a safe or warm place.
The temperature in winter can come as low as -40C and below 0C you start taking damage which is visually shown by a growing blood splatter on the screen disrupting your view + the cold weather also degrade your visuals and if you are really unlucky respawning in a blizzard your vision is even more limited.
After death you respawn wearing nothing but shorts and t-shirt + a knife, so you got a very limited time to reach a desert or other place where you can get warm and usually the degraded vision and limited time will kill you in a few minutes so that you might end up in a death loop that just goes and on until either winter turns into spring or you (rage)quit and start a new game... like I did *lol*
No matter how experienced you are with survival games I suggest you start on easy or custom difficulty to start the game in spring because leaving the tutorial on in normal difficulty starting in fall just 3-4 days before winter will kill you because following the tutorial will leave you unprepared for the winter and you end up dying a lot.
Once you have become familiar with the controls and how basic stuff works in this game you can either continue your game on easy difficulty or start a new with the difficulty settings you like.

CrossWorlds: Escape is set in a massive world with hostile Goblins and Rat people + hostile creatures.
There are lots of different biomes: Dense forest, open fields, deserts, mountains, lakes, vulcanos, caves and more where life goes on and is affected by your actions.
There are seasons and they differ a lot from each other depending on where you are in this huge world, environment, foliage and animals act accordingly to the current season, fx you won't find berries in winter, swans will move to warmer places.

PROS:

• Massive world that you really can get lost in
  
• Seasons that change visually with weather effects and impacts on the environment
  
• Good and non intrusive background music that changes according to the danger level
  
• Graphics are quite good in places especially in dense forests
  
• Actions have consequences, you can deforest an area making wildlife move away, plants and trees do slowly grow back again
  
• Survival is hard and unforgiving especially in the beginning, but even later in game mistakes can be very costly
  
• Devs are nice and active on the forum trying to help you with problems
  
• Updates seems to be roughly every 3-4 weeks
  

CONS:

• Currently craftable objects are a little rough around the edges and there aren't a lot of them and once placed they cannot be moved, you have to destroy them and build a new
  
• The building system is very basic leaving little room for creativity and removing a door, wall or other part will make parts of your house collapse even in places that are nowhere near the destroyed part - This will hopefully be fixed
  
• Enemy AI is in some cases rather stupid, fx if they attack your house they run into the wall and stay there facing the wall and sometimes you can kill them one by one from behind
  
• Random respawning after a death can in winter leave you in a death loop unable to reach a fairly safe spot before you die again
  
• While I do like that your sight is lowered when hurting or in bad weather they also in combination feels too intrusive making you unable to see where you are heading
  
[*]Some item descriptions are confusing and in some cases misleading, hopefully this will be corrected

As of now the game I can't recommend the game. World seems rather lifeless, Animal AI is terrible, and in general it just doesn't feel right. My limited gametime is because I just don't enjoy the gameplay much. Will adjust this review if the game improves but for now give it a pass.

This is a great survival game, and I can only imagine it will get even better before release. It takes a while to figure out how things work, but I never object to that in a game, I like a challenge.

The weather and seasons are great. I absolutely love the ambient insect and animal life, even though some of them startle the blorp out of me occasionally. Staying alive through winter actually feels like an achievement, especially if you underestimate how cold it is going to get (and are a real cheapskate like me, who don't want to use your resources on making shoddy clothing that don't last terribly long).

There are plenty of enemies to fight, but you can also avoid them if you just want to focus on surviving the world. Unlike games like 7 Days to Die, enemies do not constantly seek you out, so your base seems to be safe enough. The creatures in the game are also very believable. They look good, move well (I am VERY impressed with how the deer flee if you try to hunt them). The hostile ones have made short work of me, particularly when I want to "just look a little further, even though my health is at 24%". Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. At least if said cat had a statue of ressurection placed in some nice spot.

This is also a game that sucks me in, alllowing me to forget my troubles when I require it. I may think I've been playing for a few minutes, but suddenly, hours have passed. Which is invaluable when I have a bad day, one that I need to get through with a minimum of fuss.

SPOILERS:
*Unless you live in the desert, save your smelting and baking for the winter. You're going to need that extra heat then anyway.
*Find a good pine forest to go lumberjacking in, in order to get enough tree sap; you're going to want those water barrels.
*When the mists come, stay where you are, or go straight back to your base. You'll get hopelessly lost if you're not careful. When it's dark, you can at least see the horizon and keep track of your position, but in the mist, all you can see are your closest surroundings.
*If you don't live in a dense leafy forest, you will want to harvest clay during your first summer. Midsummer may be the only time water level is low enough.

I was happily surprised by this game. When buying it I read several reviews first and expected it to be in much rougher shape than it is.
FIrst off, I love the changing weather. It adds a whole new depth and sense of urgency that is lacking in other games. The building is fluid and quick though a lot of work to gather things which is alright by me. Hunting is hard but also how it should be I think. There is enough content to keep you busy with just enough struggle to make it realizstic. ANd no you dont have to wear your fingers out like it stated in another review when cutting down trees. You only need to click and hold down and it will continue cutting for you.
I have ran into a few bugs but nothing game breaking. For some reason my water icon keeps popping up in my chest inventory when I look inside covering the item that really is in there.
There are still several issues that need to be addressed though the developers made a good start with the sliding settings at the start of a game so you can set how quickly you get hungry, etc. I still think that food rots way too quickly. Even dried and in the ice box things seem to go down fast. The durability of clothes is awful, It takes a lot of work killing animals to make a set of hide clothes, then they rot off you so fast.
I have yet to go through my first winter and hope I survive. If you like survival games then I think you will enjoy this one. I look forward to the devs adding more content. I mean what else am I supposed to do on those long winter's nights?

If I were you, I would keep an eye on this game. However, at this point it still needs quite a lot of work.

Pros:

*Good building mechanics

*Very Interesting world with changing weather/seasons/terrain

*Decent survival elements


Cons:

*Very unbalanced between enemies/enviornment/resources.

*Impossible to see at night

*Get an illness/injury and it is not clear what to do before it kills you.

*Clipping issues

Has a lot of potential to be a great gem. But, at this point, it's certainly not worth the price.

Very nice for early access. Foundation is already there for a deep crafting/housing/farming system. All survival components are in place-plus weather/seasons! For the price-I would say get this. Got a feeling it will continue to grow on a great base.

After 14 hours of game time.

This is a unique survival game. This one has seasons and flooding. Like most survival games you have to worry about the basics. Food-Water-Shelter. Because of the seasons you have to plan ahead. Stock pile food and wood. Winter is harsh. Have to keep a fire going to stay warm. Make clothing to help resist the elements.
Make a shelter.

I recommend taking care of the basics before you explore the map too much, or explore places of interest.
Yes there are caves, and abandoned settlements that contain good resources, however they are usually guarded by unfriendly NPC (Spiders, maneating worms, demon dog, dwarve archers) and other unknown mobs.

There is a "lives system" in effect. There are these resurrection statues that represent your character lives.
You start off with 2 or 3. You may build more, but if you run out of lives you can't respawn. (Unless you go to main menu and click continue)

Currently only Singleplayer, with Online in the works.

The game is in Alpha so it still needs a lot of work to make it more enjoyable.
It is pretty hardcore IMO, and I have played many survival games.

Due to this new style of Survival game featuring Seasons and Flooding/Tides. I give this game a 8/10.

This is an early review of the game based on limited time so far. However, since there is only one other review at this time, I thought I would add another viewpoint.

The game's graphics are very nice, although there are one or two textures that still need a little work. The effect of the wind on the scenery is well done. I also have not experience lag or frame rate issues. So far, the game has proven to be difficult with respect to trying to determine which items can be eaten without getting food poisoning and every creature is much stronger when you start; all of which makes the game interesting. The objective of a survivial game is, after all, determining how to survive.

I am looking forward to seeing how the change of the seasons affects the game; this is a unique aspect compared with most of the current survival games. In moving around the landscape, it looks like there is an underlying plot that may prove interesting, but I am not far enough along to know yet how developed the plot is.

In looking through the discussions, the developers appear active and responding to comments which is always an important aspect of any early access game.

My opinon so far, the game shows strong promise. I am looking forward to playing it more and seeing how it develops.

Update:

Ok, I am a little further along, including having died and restarted a few times :)

The seasons add a very nice aspect to the game. The flooding that occurs is also well done. It is nice that the weather (wind, etc) affects how cold/warm you are. Shading under trees and wetness also matters. As the seasons change, the fruit and mushrooms become scarce, which is a nice aspect. However, it is difficult to gather enough food and not have it go bad prior to the change of the seasons (which change slowly as you play). I am still working on how to survive this change in the availability of food. The effects of injury and food poisoning are severe and absolutely must be avoided, which is realistic. Although, in the beginning, avoiding them while learning the basics, is very challenging, expect to have to restart a few times as you learn the ropes. There is crafting in the game. Food can be cooked. Weapons, clothing, armor, etc. can be crafted. It is possible to build buildings, but it takes a fair amount of work to harvest enough supplies (which is also realistic I suppose). The trees seem to grow (at least they seem to, I have not stayed still and just watched one to be sure that is what is happening).

The game is hard... it is a survival game, so that comes with the territory.

The developers are active, following the discussions, responding to questions/comments, and are providing updates already. They also have plans for future development, based on some of the responses.

As far as this survival game compared to the many others in my inventory, this one shows great promise. Certain aspects are still being deployed, but the aspects that are there are well done. In my opinion, the seasons, the effects of weather on the player, and the effects of the seasons on the availability of food all make this game unique and well worth adding to the collection.


Second update:

I now have close to 50 hours in on this game. Since the game's release, the developers have remained very active, adding new content and responding to both suggestions and bugs reports. Since I started playing Crossworlds, I have seen many of the suggestions made by the community implemented in the game. The crafting system has been further developed with seeds & garden plots, beds, and other items added. The developers have also responded to the criticisms regarding difficulty, etc. in so far as several aspects of the game can now be tweeked, depending on the degree of difficulty that you are looking for. The rate of food consumption and thrist can be altered, the length of the seasons can be changed, as well as several other aspects that affect game play. Based on responses from the developers, additional parameters will also be adjustable in the near future.

All in all, this game is continually evolving and the steam community is playing a role in the development, just as all of us are hoping for when we choose to participate in an alpha release.

If you are looking for a survival game that has several unique traits, this is one well worth looking at. A few of the items that I have found to be fairly unique include: the seasons change (i.e., leaves appear in the spring and drop in the fall). The snow builds up on the ground in the winter, it snows and the lakes freezes so that you can walk on them. The rate of food production for mushrooms, berries, etc. is also season dependent as well as the amount of leaves that you gather from chopping trees. Wind, rain, wetness, and shade (yes, the shade of a tree) all make a difference in how warm or cold you feel. The water level of the lake rises and falls due to flooding. Trees actually grow (not just appear as happens in most survival games). Different items burn at different rates (branches, logs, coal).

Some aspects found in other games that are also in this one: items have durability (although a somewhat unique aspect here is that durability affects function, i.e., a worn axe does not chop a tree as fast as a new axe), you can build a home, a campfire, a forge, etc. One interesting aspect of a house though, it makes a difference in the winter if you leave the door open (or don't have one). Another common aspect, if you run, you use up food and water faster. And many more.

Overall, I highly recommend considering adding this game to your collection if you are considering acquiring an additional survival game.