地球を食い荒らし気候までメチャクチャにした人類が長い年月をかけて自然を回復した後の世界。生態系への畏敬の念を取り戻し瞑想を通して自然と一体化することを学ぶため、この島で行われる大人への通過儀礼を体験する……そんな説明をマトモに受け止めなかった僕が悪かった。まさか本当にその通りの内容だったとは。

　歩き回っては頻繁に何かに咬まれ毒をもらい、生水を飲んでは何かに汚染され、傷ついた身体をそこら辺で拾った素材を回りくどい方法で加工したもので治癒し、フルーツやバナナを10個以上食べても腹一杯にならない胃袋をなんとかごまかしながら……このジャンル定番の流れですが、ここからが違います。この作品には、生きていくために不可欠なルーティーンとして「瞑想」組み込まれているのです。瞑想を怠るとヘルスが徐々に減っていくんです。嘘ではありません。
　トレイラーにある透明のドーム、あれは瞑想のためだけの施設です。狩りや採集にbuffが付くとかヘルスが回復するとか解毒してくれるとかそういうのではありません。居住空間ですらありません。ただ瞑想するだけです。瞑想が終わったら消滅し、いつの間にか無音で再生成されます。超技術。腕にも何やら技術レベルの高そうなガジェットが付いていますが、直接的にサバイバルの手助けはしてくれません。
　ここまで徹底しているのだから設置物や建物なんかは重労働の末にようやく組めるのだろうか……というとそうでもない。素材さえ持っていればビルダーツールすら無しに指定空間に読み込まれたかのような演出で数秒でシャキンと建つんですね。この辺りの演出が、サバイバルによって本来得られるはずのカタルシスを削いできます。サバイバルって何だ？

　僕が期待していたサバイバルとは、生存に不利な環境の中から探し当てた好適地を地道に自分好みに作り替え、死のリスクに立ち向かい原生生物を制圧したり絶景ポイントを見つけては身勝手な孤独感と寂寞感に浸ることができるという種類のものであって、高い技術レベルで管理された離島でわざわざ地を這って採集したもので命を繋ぎながら、善き大人になるための日課の瞑想と共に暮らしていくというスピリチュアルくさいキャンプごっこじゃないわけです。なんだろう、書いてて心が痛い。こういうのどこかで見たことある気がする。
　もうちょっと先に進めば、トレイラーにあるような大きな施設も手に入り、ひょっとすると謎解きが始まるなどしてゲームから受ける印象も多少は変わってくるのかもしれない。でもそこまでは頑張れなかった。良いところはストアでの説明に偽りがないことです。でも面白くないので返品します。僕みたいな人間はここに来てはいけなかった。

#FOVの初期値が低めなので3D酔いが苦手な人は少し上げることを勧めます。

プロモーションの映像見たら面白そうだけど
実際はそこまで面白くないので注意してください

I like the main idea of the game to be a person in the future and have a survival experience in nature without zombies, dinosaurs or what not around. I even like the part of the included meditation. And I really wanted to like this game. But unfortunately I can't.

To be fair, I played it for some hours and it was a 'nice' experience at most times. But about every half hours you have a 'Why did they do this?' moment. It's always things that should be easy to fix or would be better if they just did not do it.

There are just too many things this game gets wrong. Even parts, which work well in every other survival game. A few things that could have been made right so easily but just aren't:
- Building a house is completely useless. The house doesn't protect you from cold, rain or anything. Even if you have a fire in the house the house doesn't get any warmer. You can't place planters and some other stuff on foundations or in houses.
- Temperature over all is just messed up. If you have a fire you need to stand extremly close to it to get any warmth. You even freeze if you are directly in front of a fireplace and then turn 180° so you can't see the fire anymore. Even after you crafted the snow clothes and wear them you are freezing in the night on the tropical island. There are no other clothes to craft by the way.
- After you finished the first island you very much have everything unlocked that makes sense to build. Everything after that is just plain decorative content (with 2 small exceptions).
- The most dangerous thing in the game you will meet about a minute after you start the game. It's snakes. And they are only dangerous because you can't see them under plants and you need an anti-venom. Wolfs and even bears are no danger at all because they are stupid as hell. Stand on a rock and put 8 arrows into a bear which doesn't attack you and stares right at you.
- The worlds are completely disconnected. When you change to another world your sleeping doesn't reset ruins in the other worlds. Even fire that burnt while you were leaving will still burn days after when you return.
- In the begining you can craft 2 color position markers. You can't name them. So they are very much useless, because as soon as you mark 3 locations you can't distuinguish one from the other. In midgame you get a third color which doesn't give very much benefit.
- You can craft a green house with your bare hands but you can't craft an axe to chop down trees. You still need to collect single branches from the ground. (You could see that as part of the 'respect nature' part of the game. But in a suvival setting it should be ok to chop down some trees. Also you can kill as many animals as you like)

And this is only a small part of all the things that are wrong. I got this game in sale for 15$, but I still was disappointed.

サバイバルゲームのように見えますが
このゲームは木を切れません枝を拾うだけです
石も拾うだけですがデカイ石は超能力で砕いて拾えます
このゲームに炉はありません　鉱石から超能力で
一気に作りあげます
矢は作れますが弓が作れません
見本ムービーのように弓で動物を狩ることなんて
できるわけがありません
精神力ステータスのようなものがあり
減ってきたら瞑想が必要です
持ち運びの明かりがないので夜は超真っ暗です

アーリーアクセスじゃないの？
これで完成ですか？

Kinda terrible in all respects, it's a chore without challenge or purpose.

It's a survival crafter with little to craft or reason to craft it, neither food nor water are hard to come by, but the mechanics just make it a chore. There's essentially no gear progression.

It's a base builder, with little to build or reason to build it. You've no reason to choose one spot over another, they're all identical within each biome and everything respawns randomly after sleeping. Your objective is roaming, so to accomplish that you're better served by just building the available-from-the-start campfire and survival shelter as you wander around. There's also no real variety in what you can build, so aethetics aren't a reason to build a base.

What content there is in terms of recipes are gated behind exploration goals that are in direct contradiction to the static base-building upgrades they unlock. This game simply doesn't know what it is. In most games that do this, you at least get the feeling that you're building a base-camp to facilitate the exploration, to stock up on supplies and so on, here it just feels that each gets in the way of the other.

The interface is mind-bogglingly bad. Half your UI is handled behind a terrible radial menu that doesn't reset-to-centre AND doesn't have radial items that are toggles, so your "drains mana" (umm, enlightenment or spirit or something I mean) special harvesting mode is uneccessarily awkward to toggle on and off, and you need to do this a lot. It has a keybinding, but... well, the keybindings are terrible. Your weapon is on the "6" key. Really easy to get to in a hurry.

The other half of your UI is handled behind a tab-menu on your holographic smart watch, which is a 1990s style menu interface where you have to back in and out of "Inventory" and "Food" where "Food" means anything consumable, not just food, to be confusing. You can't just move between categories, you have to go in and out of a menu. Similarly building is divided between the building menu and the crafting menu. But wait, there's more, there's submenus. Building walls are in the building menu, submenu basic/standard/whatever, but say you want to build a fireplace? That's in the crafting > luxuries menu. What goes in what menu is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane. And navigating between them is chunky and unpleasant and involves scrolling through a giant text list with only a handful of items visible at a time. I cannot describe JUST HOW BAD THIS IS. It doesn't even sort what items you have ingredients for to the top.

The action key for various activities uses also completely random choices between press E, hold E, and Q. Similar actions will be on completely different action keys based on... well, there is no logic. Hold E to collect water into your canister. Press E to put it in a pot with from canister. Press E to drink the water from the pot. Hold E to put it in your flask (different to your canister, haha, if you put it in your canister you can't drink it). Press Q to drink it from your canister. WHAT THE ACTUAL EFF?

Oh, transferring items between containers is 1 unit of stuff at a time. There's no shift-click, ctrl-click, alt-click, right-click or anything to make transferring 50 items not take you 50 clicks. Seriously. Couple that with the fact that you have to juggle your inventory around all the time to make room to build stuff, and build mode doesn't pull from nearby containers, only your main inv. It's painful.

Gathering resources has a janky-ass jerky animation to grab with your hand, and a delay until the animation completes before you can gather again. So it manages to be jarringly fast AND painfully slow at the same time. Amazing. And that's before we get into the difference between gathering something and, I dunno, "force gathering" something which is... press the "3" key to toggle force mode, then gather, then toggle force mode off again. It's a really important gameplay difference. Oh, it also often means an even more annoying animation. WHY? There's literally no difference to this mode. It just uses a mana bar up, but you can get that back by meditating at any of the meditation globes that you're never more than 10 yards from. If you can y'know, deal with having to sit there doing nothing for 90 seconds to get your bar back.

Combat is flat out terrible. You have a bow, which... feels like a peashooter, it has the "plinkiest" arrows I've seen in any game. You also have a spear which... goes nowhere near where your crosshair is and has a terrible animation and recovery and hitbox that is either over the head of things because you're too close or doesn't reach because you're too far. If ti does hit it basically 1-shots everything I've fought so far. It's both annoyingly finicky and utterly without challenge.

Navigation is... well, a patch added a map, but the map is... terrible. I don't mind that it doesn't have a GPS showing you where you are, but could it at least BE a map of something? It's blobs of island-shaped terrain that doesn't have any recognisable landmarks. The second biome has a river, but yeah, that's the only thing you can recognise on the map. It's a crayon drawing, not a map, it serves no navigation purposes or even orientation purposes.

This game is a hard pass. It's terribly clunky, has no idea what it's trying to achieve as a game, feels like it has less depth than any of the 200 abandoned early-access survival-crafting base-builders that have plagued Steam in the past decade, is full of jank and has absolutely zero charm to carry it through.

I'd rather play Ark: a game I feel has blighted the genre with its terrible mechanics, because at least it has stuff to do, reasons to do it, variety, meaningful gameplay choices, and a vaguely functioning UI with some quality of life measures in place.

I bought it on sale price and it wasn't worth it. There's even more that is bad about this game, but honestly if you've managed to not be put off by any of this then minor stuff like the cheese-worthy voice acting and half-assed plot and immersion breaking stuff like the random chests won't really be a big deal to you.

Avoid at all costs.

Understand that I only played an hour of the game before I refunded it but I still wanted to give some feedback.

The game looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful and walking around feels good.

But that's about where it stops for me.

You can't craft tools, instead you use some sort of psychic ability that you just have as a baseline thing. No need to upgrade or train it, you can just do everything. Mine Crystals, pick up Clay, skin / harvest animals, etc. all in one ability.

You can craft a spear to kill said animals but the boar that I encountered died in one hit.

The tutorial missions are okay but having to wait for 30 minutes until it gets night and you can sleep to progress was kind of boring. I ran around the area and picked up random stuff. My inventory filled fairly quickly and I started building everything I had access to. Sadly none of it was even remotely exciting to build.
The rabbit trap was placed near a location where I spotted a rabbit but nothing was caught after I woke up from sleeping so not too sure how it works.

And that is the segment into "Not sure how it works".
For some reason I got affected by a pathogen. It slowly drained my HP.
There are no hints or anything that explain how to deal with this pathogen.
I don't even know where I got it from. Did I drink stagnant water? Did I catch it from running around in the rain?
No idea but hey now I am sick and need to find a cure. Sadly nothing in the UI/Inventory gave any hints as to how.
So I explored more while being on the hunt for the tutorial quest "Find ruins and meditate".

The two hexagonal indicators sent me to anywhere but the ruins so I am now running around the island completely lost. Couldn't remember the way back to my original camp. I was still sick with this pathogen, no idea what I am doing when I suddenly encountered a snake and got bit.
Now I was also poisoned. So my health is going down even faster.
I decided with my full inventory that I should maybe just build a second shelter, fire, etc.
So I did, I also thought: Hey let me at least look at some cooking recipes before I died. So I built the cook pot and lo and behold there it is.
Things to cook to fight off the pathogen and the poison.

So I went and started getting the stuff to survive. It was a nail biter but I somehow managed to not die.

Great! Now to find the ruins.
I wandered the island aimlessly until I stumpled upon a golden glowing sphere which seemed to be the correct spot.
I sat down and meditated and it was explained to me that once a day one of those spheres near ruins glows golden and teaches you a new recipe.

While meditating it dawned on me that this game is not for me so I hit alt + f4 and refunded it.

---

For those that need a tl;dr:

Pros:

+ game looks beautiful
+ animals are cute
+ the guided meditation I stumbled upon was fun to follow along irl

Cons:

- navigating is confusing as there is no map nor quest indicators
- You have to figure everything out yourself or look up a guide if you want to find antidotes and cures
- cooking recipes give you buffs but don't say for how long and there are no UI indicators at all
- meditating is mandatory to keep your character sane but it's annoying to constantly have to meditate
- the crafting UI is horrible as you can't even see what item exactly you need to craft something. Going by icons only isn't it.
- Game gives no hints about anything besides the couple of words of the tutorial quest in the top left corner.

I love survival games. When I purchased this, I was very excited as the visuals of the game are stunning. The issue, however, is with the gameplay.
I can see what the devs were trying to accomplish. The idea of a survival game with a focus on the atmosphere and philosophy of appreciating nature. Unfortunately, there's just not enough to do to really make it feel worth it. With no real feeling of conflict, the game is relaxing and you can focus on just enjoying the beauty, but after about an hour you're left wondering, "What now?"
I love the concept of this game, I just wish there was more to it than wandering around aimlessly getting infinite materials with no real difficulty, just to build a base with nothing particularly exciting and interesting in it. If the devs ever came in and added more content, and maybe some form of difficulty or conflict, I'd jump back in immediately. Unfortunately for now though, I can't recommend the game based solely on its (to be fair, GORGEOUS) visuals.

It gives you almost no time to heal yourself if you are under a pathogen or needing antivenom. Basically a cure to bring your health back. It then kicks you to "medical evacuation" and you go to the main menu and you can bring up your saved game, but hopefully you save it in time, and if you did you get less and less time each time while trying to cure yourself. For example, I finally was able to get all the material needed for the cure/treatment and I kept getting kicked to the main menu and each time I came back my time to cure was less and less, making it impossible.

I watched a lot of this games development on Tiktok. I fell for the hype. for $25 no. I can't recommend it.

Its glitchy and slow. The combat leaves a lot to be desired. Shooting the bow feels hurried and disjointed. No basic storage from the get go. Stacking sticks and rocks, they may not despawn but you can't mass transfer, and dropping one by one will send sticks or rocks flying as they hit each other. There is no map, explore all you want, unless your drawing it out in real life, its easy to get lost, or maybe I am too reliant on in game maps.

I haven't even found the third mediation ruins on the first level before uninstalling. I was told storage did exist and was "easy" to get from the social media manager, developer (?), on tiktok. Guess I needed to find the third ruins... cause I went and looked. I had no storage except a basket and that was no different to dropping stuff on the ground.

If you want a relaxing chill "base building" game try Among Trees.

After playing this game for 1½ hour I was already feed up with it. I tried to get a refund, but Steam wouldn’t agree on this due to 14 days limitation. So, instead I’m doing this review on why this game was so annoying and why you shouldn’t buy it!

It is highlighted as a casual, relaxing, base building simulator and survival game. Your goal is living the land in balance with nature, rather than fight your way to prosperity. Experience a relaxing and engaging survival game, where you can build a huge home with over 50 unique building modules and 160 unique items as you explore. Yeah, almost all of this is NOT the case.

Instead, you wander frustrated around in circles in a flourish biome with no sense of direction or help, to look for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ forsaken items, locations and ruins you need to unlock for new crafting recipes. Yes, you do have a map, but it is utterly useless and only shows a schematic area of all the biomes. You have to constantly gather food, watch out for snakes or other animals that tries to kill you. I you do get poisoned, make sure you know where to find the right medicine or at least have many, MANY save games so you can reload. Be careful not to overwrite a previous save game if you are sick or poisoned. You will probably end up die constantly when reloading.

Then there is the meditation, which of course is the central part of the game, but this has to be done so often and takes enormous amount of your time, which barely have when you also need to explore, build, survive, craft, progress before it becomes nighttime. Because when it is night, it is too cold to be outside.

Retreat to Enen is definitely not a relaxing nor peaceful survival game and it does not help that the UI and combat system is so to say, absolutely ridiculous bad. So don’t, DON’T buy this game.

Score: 2/10