A Critical Analysis of the Solarpunk Demo

[ThisOscar]

I saw clips of this game on social media a while ago, and I was really excited; I’ve always wanted a survival craft game with this vibe! Upon playing the demo, it’s clear that the developers have a really strong idea, but need more time to actually create a quality final product. Keep in mind that I played on Steam Deck, which didn’t cause any problems, so props to that!

There are 3 things that make this game so exciting to me:
1. Exciting traversal of sky islands, akin to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Building airships and flying around and exploring a procedurally generated world of floating islands is a concept that has a lot of space to be further explored.
2. Eco-Factory and farming. Combining the beauty of the natural world with the engineering of technology fills the niche of people who like cozy farm games like Stardew Valley, while also appealing to a more logical and puzzle oriented mindset. This should open the floor to creative base and factory designs, both in appearance and technical excellence.
3. Survival craft. It’s always a fun genre, and mixing it with the other genres is what makes Solarpunk such an original idea.

Ideally, these 3 ideas should all be equally mixed into the core gameplay loop. Progressing in one should provide new gameplay ideas for another. The demo does a great job at providing interesting survival craft progression. As you play, you can upgrade your tools and research new items that add to your gameplay experience! The problem is, this kind of progression is only available for the survival craft elements. Once you start a farm, there’s very little you can do with it past that point. Once you unlock the airship, there’s literally nowhere to go. Once you get the circuit stuff, you can set it up and that’s about it. By leaving everything that makes Solarpunk special out of the core gameplay loop, it turns the overall experience into a straightforward and boring survival craft game. The demo should have shown off an exciting gameplay loop that seamlessly implements all the game’s elements and leaves you excited for the full release, but that’s not what we have.

Apart from this major issue, there a bunch of minor things that need to be fixed. The airship controls are extremely unintuitive. Going down stairs is weirdly snappy and unpredictable, and a plethora of QOL improvements are needed.

There’s clear potential here. All of the issues I’ve talked about can be fixed easily: focus more on the other parts of the game. We want more than just another survival craft, we want to explore sky islands and build cute environmentally friendly factories. All of this may even be reflected in the current dev build; i just don’t know. What I do know is that if the final game is at all like the demo, I won’t be buying it. I urge the devs to rework the demo and release an update that shows off all the potential this game has!

[Ramstar]

Not sure I understand what you’re saying about the demo and nowhere else to go etc. that’s just limited in the demo.

The only thing I really agree with here and am curious about is that once you get the solar stuff setup in the demo, it is kind of end of demo. I actually enjoyed watering the plants then the rest bite when it rained. With the sprinkler it’s like now what do i do, that gameplay loop has gone.

Maybe it is not that easy to get sprinkler in main game though and they were just showing it off.