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Fans of Subnautica and Satisfactory will love this new mix of survival game and factory simulation, as you turn a barren world into a verdant paradise.
Open world sandbox games are an unusually broad genre. United by their large landmasses and the appearance of total freedom to roam, in actuality most are defined by the strict limits they place on players, forcing you to take care of your own survival before you can get stuck into loftier goals. For example, Subnautica and its sequels give you an undersea world to explore, but only a small amount of air to do it, making your initial forays into the deep, brief and nerve-racking.
Satisfactory’s gloriously pristine landscape looks inviting enough, until you discover the large number of creatures that want to kill you. Climbing the game’s tech tree gives you access to both weapons and the ability to run fast enough to beat a hasty retreat, as you transform an untouched paradise into a sprawling set of intricately engineered factory complexes, your indelible imprint on the world visible wherever you look.
The Planet Crafter inverts that approach. Instead of an untouched Eden, at the beginning of the game you find yourself on a hostile planet with only your one-man escape pod, surrounded by a desolate Martian style red desert. Beset by sandstorms and violent meteor showers, the airless, deep frozen environment will kill you if you stray too far from your tiny haven, your oxygen tank draining if you don’t swiftly return to safety.
Scattered around you are mineral deposits you can harvest and use for basic crafting. Clumps of ice can be turned into potable water, while the remains of ancient, crashed spaceships yield sealed packs of rations, helping keep thirst and hunger at bay while you start figuring out what to do. Having to hunt for resources, combined with your limited air supply and constant need to find food and water, adds tension to your attempts at exploration.
At least in The Planet Crafter it’s only the harsh environment that will kill you, the lifeless rock you’re stuck on incapable of supporting Satisfactory’s nightmarish giant spiders or Subnautica’s murderous leviathans. You will end up dying quite a bit at first though, losing precious inventory items when you do. They automatically get boxed up, waiting for you where you died, but with no map or compass to assist in finding them, rarely tend to be seen again – at least until you stumble across them later in the game, when their contents suddenly don’t seem as important.
That’s because your interactions with the nameless planet feature an escalating drip feed of novel tech and equipment, gradually making you better suited to life in its expansive wastes. Longer lasting oxygen tanks, more inventory space, faster running speed, and soon enough a jetpack, start to make traversal more straightforward. This gives you more rapid access to the diverse biomes, many of which come with different crafting materials to further expand your reach and abilities.
Your goal in The Planet Crafter is terraforming; turning the bleakly infertile hellscape into something more welcoming. Starting with simple wind turbines and solar cells, you use your rudimentary power supply to fuel heaters that warm the surface, while drilling rigs release gas into the atmosphere, incrementally increasing air temperature and pressure, from an initial icy vacuum to something that might one day sustain life.
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