Something you should know about me: I am a control freak obsessed with colony sims. I have over 2500 hours in Going Medieval. I have almost that in RimWorld. But the thing about drugs is you eventually get used to it, and develop a tolerance. You need a new hit. So I went looking through Steam and found one with user reviews that summed it up as “Vanilla Rimworld but 3D.” Ohh, yeah, inject that right into my veins. Early Access? I said into my veins I don’t care Daddy needs a fix.
Have you heard of Haemimont Games? It may not ring a bell, even if you’re a real sicko like me, but they have made a LOT of this kind of thing. Surviving Mars? That was them. Tropico 3, Tropico 4 and Tropico 5? That’s them. Celtic Kings: Rage of War? Okay, only I remember that one…but yeah that was them, too. (Pouring one out to Strategy First, RIP to the homey). That’s the developer. Frontier Foundry, the publishing arm of the company behind Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster is handling publishing. NOT BAD!
Your colonists were in a spaceship and it went boom, leaving your crew and the remains of the spaceship crashing onto an unexplored alien world. Since it’s Early Access, right now it’s only one kind of alien world, though you can enter in a random generation seed to mix it up some. Your choice of colonists is a pleasing mix of abilities and downsides, like the vegetarian engineer is absolutely not going to eat dead animals. Or dead bugs. Or dead…whatever the hell those things are. Plants only don’t you know the bugs that keep raiding our colony have feelings?!
Stranded: Alien Dawn hits the colony sim/survival buttons you know and understand like picking a crew, trying to keep their dumb asses alive, trying to get them indoor housing, etc., and adds some interesting elements like…it’s a frickin’ alien world. Can you eat that thing? What the hell is that animal? Can I eat that? Why do I keep throwing up because I eat random things? If you want a diet that’s something other than dead animals, it’s time to RESEARCH IT. This plays a great little animation of your people circling around the plant or animal in question and making “Hmm! HMMM!” noises. And sometimes they come away like “That bush? It’s a bush, yo.” DAMN THANKS FOR TAKING THE TIME. But that’s life as a stranded survivor on an alien world. Also those peaceful-looking birds? NOT SO PEACEFUL, WISH I’D RESEARCHED IT BEFORE I BUILT EVERYONE’S SHELTERS BY THEM BUT I AM VERY STUPID.
The animals are, actually, pretty interesting. Obviously, they are walking sources of meat and potentially hides and other crafting materials. But they fight with each other. Get a farm running and they’ll come eat your stuff. Some may raid your settlement because they hate you. You’ll get the experience of charging out of your house in the middle of winter, no pants on, waving your shotgun around, and hollering because the goddamn local wildlife keeps eating your crops.
Also: get the tailoring workstation up early because your pants will wear out and your colonists will be Donald Duckin’ it in the middle of winter. This makes them very unhappy. Trust me.
The combination of “trying to get these rubes to live in a shack” with “but also there’s advanced technology since your refugees from a spaceship” makes the research and technology interesting. Getting electricity up and running isn’t that hard, but you may freeze to death since you forgot to learn how to build walls and live indoors. BAD IDEA! On the other hand, while scavenging spaceship remains, you might find some high-end CPUs that would be very nice for your electrical grid but frankly, game, i was hoping for medication or survival rations these idiots are dying but thanks to the Intel i69-420-xxx processors from SPACE NEWEGG are really handy right now.
While there’s only a limited roster of survivors at the moment, they do have some interesting and sometimes hilarious perks. Some of them really love violence. REALLY love violence. You’ll see them surrounded by angry bugs or birds or birds that look like bugs, fighting for their lives with only a shank, bleeding from every limb, and spamming happy emoticons like this is literally the greatest day of my life.
At some point, you can research and unlock expeditions to send your colonists to explore faraway points of interest, but I haven’t managed it because I am trying to remember things like “please keep them clothed” and “Winter=VERY COLD”. I don’t know what the endgame looks like because I keep getting them killed. I do know you can level up from simple wooden fences to some pretty interesting systems, like setting up solar grids and batteries and generators and motion detectors and gun and missile turrets. That said, you probably want to make sure they have a warm coat since it is frickin’ freezing out and they absolutely will go wandering through the snow wearing nothing because their clothes rotted off.
For Early Access veterans, know that we are in the “tuned down the frequency of vomiting” stage of patch notes/development. That said, on my usual “Is this worth it if they take the money and run?” scale, I’ve already gotten 60 hours of game out of it. This was, indeed, the hit I needed.
