Recent reviews by Variant

I would describe this game as easy, but that is not entirely accurate. The game is overall extremely forgiving, while individual pieces of the game have increased difficulty and are less forgiving. The combat is very unforgiving, punishing any mistake made in early game with a quick death. This is resolved by learning how combat works, and playing more defensively. Shortly later in the game you receive more of a buffer of health, and when attacking enemies that are on-level it is very clear that you should prioritize either levelling the playing field or never getting hit.

The combat tutorial is lacking, dodging hits in this game is easy and simplifies much of the combat. After that discovery (very early in gameplay) the rest of the game's combat is mostly trivial. Dying goes from commonplace to rather rare, and usually only caused by new enemies with new attack patterns. This is a Souls-lite game, each fight requires effort and can easily result in death if you do not focus or learn how to play.

When you die, you don't lose everything you had. You keep every piece of equipment and food/healing items, and anything else you may need for combat. Your buffs are lost, and every other item you had is recoverable at a permanent grave site.

You can fast travel for free after crafting basic posts at the shoreline of islands, max of 10 which is very generous considering you get all materials back when destroying them (and almost all other buildings as well)

The only times you can truly lose materials or items is by accidentally recycling equipment (less materials returned than spent) or crafting/upgrading/buying items you didn't need.
If your ship is sunk, it is very cheap to repair them compared to what you spend on anything else in the game, and their entire inventory comes back with them.


The game does not try to hide its inspirations, The devs very clearly enjoyed Valheim and AC4 Black Flag enough to make a pirate game using the best parts of each.

There are some points of frustration in the mid-game, especially with optimization. It seems that light sources like torches cause dips in framerate regardless of video settings, which causes large bases to be nearly unusable before you are able to get larger and more efficient light sources.

While I have not experienced this, my friends have had big fps drops in cooperative fights, especially late-game boarding.

The game is overall a solid 7-8/10 so far. More sandbox settings and customization, as well as some tweaking of the early game to give the player a better idea of what to expect could elevate it to a 8-9 easily. Looking forward to the remainder of the content available.

A fun little detective game, I found some of the conclusions unintuitive, and others were overly easy. I enjoyed the 'progression' of tools, although one definitely seemed underutilized. solid 7/10

A cute little game.

I 100%ed it in under 1.5 hours

It has some good language deduction.

There isn't much progression to the game, all tools are available from the moment you start the game, and you can solve nearly the entire "manual" on the first day, except for missing pages.
You can have every solution in-hand by the beginning of the second day, and for the "perfect" ending you need to have done that.

It's not that hard, just requires some tinkering to understand and a willingness to restart the first day a time or two.
I appreciated very much the 4 page segment on complicated diseases but felt annoyed after I realized it was simply the logical addition of poisonous combinations and those disease's cures recreated visually.

A form of this game but slightly grander, possibly with obfuscated symptoms or disease progression would be extremely interesting.

I can't tell if this game is going to be good or bad, but it feels unpolished. I assumed this was early access when I played it.

the game is extremely goofy, and it feels like lethal company phasmophobia.
The only "horror" of the game is the design of the monsters and attempts at jumpscares.

Most of the gameplay is gameplay for gameplay's sake, it doesn't make sense why you cant use the hacking device and the keypad at the same time when they are 1 foot from eachother. it forces coop but beyond that it's a goofy idea, would make more sense if they were farther away. The code being arrow keys is also silly considering it's a 10-digit keypad.

More or less all of the gameplay is silly like that.

The game has suspense/tension before you understand the gameplay, but I think i'd rather play lethal company or phasmophobia individually.

I have only scratched the surface, Brass tacks:

Submarine customization is super cool, i love mechanics like that in games. space management with specific connections will always be engaging in these situations - like resident evil inventories.

Exploring outposts is cool so far, mostly empty but some unique interactions that keep me interested.

Sub Combat is okay, I wish there was more for the pilot to do when there are no sea mines other than dodging constant rocks on higher difficulties, such as maneuvering for physically docking and boarding subs or something else.
Maybe some kind of torpedo dodging?

Melee combat is nothing special, there to make enemies a threat. I appreciate the amount of healing that was offered to us.

Everything else is cool enough.

Definitely recommend playing multiplayer with 1-3 friends.

As a standalone game from an indie dev, it's not the worst thing, but it's not my thing.

Considering this kickstarter was funded 5 years ago, and promised far more than was delivered, and what has been delivered is not up to par with what I have seen promised, this is a no from me.

The classes feel mostly useless, none of the tools do that much.
hacking can open doors
the gun can make 3 dinos sleep for about 5 seconds per full resupply
the motion sensor gives you some information

The dinos are not intelligent or fun to fight - the easiest ai to cheese I have encountered

for a game that was almost 150% funded on kickstarter 5 years ago, this is abysmal.
I have no hopes for the future

Edit starts here:
For a game that had to be rebuilt starting 18 months ago, that feels absolutely correct.
If you're fine with supporting an indie dev on their relatively first game of this type, this game could be ok.

I doubt this game is going to do anything that a thousand other games haven't.
The difference will probably be graphical - dinosaurs instead of ghosts, etc

good game

10/10
the best game I have ever played for less than an hour

game ran almost flawlessly on steam deck. A great little puzzle game if the orwell games felt like they dragged on or were too heavy handed

This game is exactly how it seems.

the entire game is some pretty pixel art, a little minigame, and an upgrade store.
It is extremely charming, and has the ability to play itself in idle mode where you can admire how it looks on a spare monitor as your character and pet go fishing.

It naturally supports resizing the window to whatever size so you can have a small sliver or a full screen of the game.
I'm pretty sure there isn't any AI art.

The supporter edition includes a cat and another dog skin.

It doesn't need more.