Soulmask

I like this game. It has the potential for hundreds, or even thousands, of hours of game play.
If I had to pick one thing that annoys me, it's when any company announces a "Free DLC" before their game is even out of beta (Early Access). Just release it as a normal update and stop acting like you're giving us something for free. We gave you our money to help you beta test your game, I don't need "free stuff" to recommend your game to others, I just need you to continuously improve your game, squash bugs in a timely manner, and move your game towards no longer being Early Access.

It's a bit like Conan Exiles and Ark had a baby (without the Funcom incompetence)

The Good

1. It's very polished for an early access game
2. Minimal amount of bugs
3. The devs are active
4. It's very pretty
5. Combat is fun

The Not so good

1. For armour and decoration unlocks related to bosses YOU have to get the killing shot. I feel this is quite punishing to people who play with friends and should be changed to allow for everyone that did a certain percentage of damage to receive the unlocks. It also leaves people on public servers open to being griefed when someone can snipe the last shot in without having been involved in the fight at all. While the game is great overall this would be the one reason I would not recommend it to friends.

Feels like early Conan Exiles mixed with thrall camp management. This is not a short game, you will have to grind for better thralls - ones for you to play as, 3 fighter companions to travel with, and several more for your camp specialising in gathering, crafting, slaughtering etc. The map is large and exp is slow.

I recommend playing on casual or easy to start off with. It is brutal. You can change settings at any time.

9/10 - love this grindy game. Combat is good, different weapons all have several abilities to choose from (some hidden behind different thrall-types like warrior, guard, hunter, etc). I also love that the animals and mounts you capture have tiers, so you can grind for better ones (mythic mounts are a different colour and have better stats).

I look forward to further development: hopefully they introduce more decorations for my base, and fill in some areas of the map that are a little lacking or repetitive.

Our 3 person crew has beat valheim, modded 7D2D, many minecraft modpacks, modded multiplayer rimworld, the forest, and various other co-op crafting survival games.

So far we're enjoying SoulMask! It has enough QoL features such that eating/drinking/managing inventory isn't a horrible grind. We can focus on what each of us enjoys: scouting the map, automating supply chains, and base building. Then we go out together on bigger combat adventures.

Works great hosting a private instance or dedicated server for your gaming crew!

Huge beautiful world. I have a lot to explore. The weather effects are pretty cool. Capturing NPCs and assigning them handle the collecting, farming, work stations, breeding pens, is satisfying. I even have someone assigned to handle the waste from the outhouse! You can breed a ton of animals in this game. You also capture NPCs so you can play as them. NPCs have potential to get much stronger than your starting character. You can freely play as any of the NPCs in your tribe, a feature that I think is unique and which I really enjoy. There is quite a bit of variety in the appearances of the NPCs but I hope they add more. There is no interaction with NPCs other than killing them or converting them to your tribe.
Your tribe also organizes all your boxes for you! Come back from a run, dump all your loot into a general box and they will sort it all out for you! You can also automatically craft from all local storage. You don't have to run and get stuff from boxes. I don't know if I could play another game like this without these features.
Combat is pretty typical for this type of game. Each type of weapon does have 6 or 8 different moves and I've enjoyed learning to use them.
Progression seems similar to other types of games like this. Each biome requires more levels and better ores for crafting better weapons and armor, new medicines for buffs and dispels.
I wish the game provided me with a stronger sense of purpose or urgency. Nothing has attacked my base but I read that it can happen. There doesn't seem to be any roving tribal threats or monsters. There seems to be some sort of mystery involving the temples and dungeons and mechanical creatures inside them but I don't know why that should concern me.
There are game settings and sliders for just about everything in the game. I turned up the base raiding metric but it hasn't resulted in a raid yet. There is mod support. I run a few mods and it has added to the game playing experience. I didn't try PVP. I looked at the servers and didn't see much activity. You can play with friends if you want.
One thing that annoys me about the game: my tribesmen like to dance when they aren't doing chores but they dance to NO MUSIC. It's just weird. How about some singing, maybe some drums...................

I played a lot of survival games, like rust, the forest, conan exiles, runescape dragonwilds, valheim and i can say that SOULMASK is super underrated survival game, which combines many mechanics together and does a better job than other survival games.

This game does a lot of things right. The devs seem to have taken inspiration from all of the popular games in the genre as well as thier complaints and made a game that, mostly, delivers on the failed potential of it's forebearers.

It's got "recruitable" tribesmen that join your team willingly and can be fully automated to do the bulk of the gathering and crafting grind for you. They are very well implimented and have their own likes and dislikes. They communicate in the in game chat window. The ai can even sometimes lead to the illusion of them having personalities.

The nudity, violence, and gore from games like Conan Exiles is toned down to a PG rated experience.

My pros and cons from a primarily PVE player:

The grind: You have a lot of things to level up an xp is slow. The major gatekept resources have only one reliable source leaving you to grind that source out for a long time until you are ready for the next area.

You aren't restricted to which mask you pick but each mask needs to be leveled up. You aren't restricted to which body you pick but each body needs to be leveled up, Your tribesmen only level to end game while you have control of them, so that's a grind as well.

It was recommended to me to set the xp gains to 3.5 which felt about right but even at the max 5x it felt like there was a lot of xp farming rather than just relying on natural xp gains. A lot of this can be done afking on a crafting bench while you watch youtube videos.

Movement: It has advanced movement like climbing and the glider but disables both without warning when near things like dungeons or sometimes just randomly.

The glider is a bit frustrating as it auto closes when you are close to the ground and sometimes if the ledge you are jumping off has a bit of a tail, it can think it's close to the ground leaving you to try to panic relaunch it before impact, it also feels like they don't want you to ever use it as it quickly drains your stamina.

The climbing is not as sticky as it is in other games leaving you to fail to climb a ledge several times before doing it successfully. Since some areas can't be climbed you often are confused whether you can actually climb a spot or not.

Mounts: It has a healthy amount of mounts and balances them in an interesting but sometimes frustrating way. For example the Alpaca has more cargo room and can jump but the boar is faster. The jaguar is faster and can jump but slows down in the snow, The snow leopard is faster and can jump but the ostrich can "glide" and has natural radiation removal.

There is a fun variety but the balance isn't always equal. The snow leopard can do fine in the desert and jumping is far more valuable than gliding, etc. Also sometimes their AI will freak out and sometimes it just won't work and they will just stand there in combat and die.

Fast Travel: There are unlockable fast travel portals spread around the map in such a way that it doesn't ever feel like too far to get anywhere and you can even find the parts to assemble one for your base.

The Map: The first map zone is too big leaving new players to feel that it is all the game has to offer. In truth there may be too many biomes as some seem stretched paper thin between others. Still, much of it seems hand crafted and there is a definite beauty to be found out there. The map is about as big as it can be in the Unreal engine.

Building: It has a natural progression thatch-wood-stone-blackstone as well as one alternative nightstone (obsidian) set as well as a foundation for major "treehouse" structures. Your workers can be set to auto-update the older blocks and you can even have them fill in a blueprint for you. There's not much for furniture and vanity/RP items yet but the game is much younger than the others and the devs seem to be adding more and more into the game.

Farming and animal handling: This system was far too complicated for me to baby-sit luckily setting up the automation for it was easy and fun. make a plot, get seeds, plant seeds, make various fertilizers, make various pesticides, etc. with each step needing some level of attention and automation.

Cooking: Cooking is ok, there are a lot of recipes that require a lot of different ingredients but there does always seem to be a minor answer and major answer for each of the major reasons you need to eat. For example, a food that buffs your breath a little and one that does it a lot. A food that gives you cold resist and one that gives you more. I'd like to see more variety here but I know I'm the only one so it's forgivable.

Content: The dungeons are very repetitive and sometimes you can forget which one you are in. But there is enough content to easily forgive that. Off the top of my head: pyramid Bosses, elite bosses, dungeons, small ruins, large ruins, barracks, cities, caves, a couple of timed procedural dungeons, a zone-based npc arena system, a hunting system, hidden tablets, and a few unique free-DLC areas.

Overall: All in all it brings tons of depth to each system it is iterating on, there is tons of content to enjoy, and combat can be fun. The devs seem to be offering solutions to player complaints either via the server settings or optional alternative content in-game.