The Survivalists

I played this game a few years back. About to replay, only to learn they abandoned this game. Team 17 are one of my favourite studios, but this is crime. The game is not a failure. It has been marketed poorly and therefore abandoned because of this error. The art style, castaway theme and crafting system is amazing. Super cozy chill game with completability. I am so disappointed that it has been forgotten.

I really enjoy the crafting progression, art style, and gameplay. I love wandering around the island with my army of monkeys.
But The Survivalists falls short in the multiplayer aspect, which is the only way I played it (with a friend) and which is the reason I got it.
Multiplayer doesn't allow the non-host to progress major recipes (the first bomb recipe) or recipes bought from the sellers (hot air balloon guy). Which means if my friend was hosting, only he'd be able to build bombs to unlock caves even though he played as the homebody, setting up based and fortifications, and I went out exploring. I'd unlock new recipes that I couldn't even use unless I went back to my own game and repeated every single mission up until that point.
Why not just let us both progress in a single game?

I love playing this game with my son, it connects us and it's fun. It's nice considering he's 13 now, but this is one of the ways we hang out :) forever thankful!

I don't think the game is being updated anymore which is a shame. There are some QoL things that could be included to make e.g. base maintenance more enjoyable. Particularly auto-sort to chest from inventory as well as sort by item type within chests. The game is pretty grindy but once you unlock teleporters it's a little less annoying to access the resources you need. The best aspects of the game are the visuals and the various crafting trees. Progression feels nice. Teaching monkeys to work for you is an okay gimmick. Though you end up standing around supervising them anyway so being able to 1) craft from chests and 2) level up your own crafting ability would save a lot of time honestly. The final island mostly just has recolours of earlier enemies I think, or they look very similar anyway. I haven't done any labyrinths yet. There's plenty to do and decent variety to the gameplay loop.

Seriously nice game with an immensely gratifying inventory management system and potential, but an aggravating mouse & keyboard experience.

The inventory management system is incredible for a digital hoarder like me. I absolutely love it. The system for gradually streamlining crafting & production goes nicely hand in hand with it. Unless you play with a mouse and a keyboard. The concept that should work flawlessly _especially_ on keyb & mouse, but it currently does the opposite. Crafting is a pain without using the streamlining game mechanic, which itself is very janky on a kb&m.

I mean that the lengths at which even kb controls are designed for console controllers cause endless misclicks. It happens in all kinds of situations, making you start processes all over again, when they're supposed to be automated. All the while the game displays speech bubbles like "This is so boring! I should ", which at this point feels like it's jeering at my struggles to use that exact mechanic.

Another problem is assigning mouse and keyboard keys. It seems the game is hard-coded with several different "limits" to control settings. (Like it "groups" some invisible controls.) This would otherwise not be a problem, but for example, I literally cannot assign the action "use item" to clicking my right mouse button. Why? I have no idea. I've checked 5 times, and RMB or right mouse button isn't used to do anything else either. I've never tried to modify the game files in any way, this is all base game behavior. It's probably a bug left undetected due to minimal or virtually no game testing done on a kb&m as of the date.

The game is clearly designed for console controller users. This really wouldn't be a problem, if it had been apparent before purchase, or if the game worked fine with a mouse & keyboard by now. The immense potential of the game gets largely buried under the janky control scheme. But it's not enough trouble to make me turn my back to it, at least not for a while. I'm on a personal mission to sort through as much of the problems I can by using macros.

But some things are simply impossible. Even if you use a different key for literally every type of action you can. For example, sometimes the monkeys come very close to you while you're carrying an object. I mean, their whole point is to follow you, so of course. But in that case, you just cannot put the object down, even if you're facing away from the monkey and trying to place it on unobstructed ground. Even if you press a button that isn't configured to do anything else, other than to put things down on the ground.

That's because a console controller doesn't have enough buttons to specify between monkey interactions and putting objects down, and the game doesn't seem to acknowledge the fact that a kb&m have more than enough. But the game is cheap and the studio's The Escapists game is also primarily for consoles. It's not something I'm upset about, it's simply a problem that I thought wouldn't be overlooked when a game is sold on Steam for PCs.

Fun game with a lot of satisfying crafting mechanics.
It has some rough edges on how much can everything be automatized, but game is short enough that it is not becoming a burden.

Big downside - a lot of technical issues (corrupted save, crashes), but it seemed to be only on my PC some kind incompatibility. Majority of other players have not encountered them.

이 게임 자잘한 버그 (땟목에서 안 나와진다던가, 원숭이들이 갑자기 사라져서 멀리 뿅 생긴다던가)가 은근히 많은데 원숭이 훈련시켜서 일하게 만든다는 아이디어도 좋았고 인디게임 특유의 소소한 재미가 있어 추천합니다. 파밍, 크래프팅 재미도 있구요. 다만 도과 따시는 분들 멀티하면 게스트는 안 되고 호스트만 따지는 부분이 있으니 방장을 바꿔가며 노가다를 좀 해야 합니다 ㅠ