Necesse

I am always on the lookout for hot survival crafting action. I picked up Necesse based on the overwhelmingly positive Early Access reviews, not realizing it’s in 0.21. Ooops. So we’re a bit early in development here, but this game has a very active dev.

This really is “top-down Terraria,” described by some as a mashup of Terraria/Rimworld (the latter of which has been on my list for ages). The first few hours of play, it did give me that same feel of spelunking in Terraria and finding little ruins and whatnot.

Instead of digging down into the world, there is a single-level dungeon under each island. You can sail to other islands, including those with NPC villages, dungeons, or pirates.

I did my usual and built a little farm and fenced some livestock. I explored specifically to collect seeds and plant specimens for my island, but after a while travel felt like a burden (you can sail quickly, but the day-night cycle is a nuisance and a lot of the other islands are so big and empty right now). You can steal from villages without consequence so I raided a few to furnish my town. As someone who is primarily interested in exploring, the game is a little lacking that area so far. Most of the islands are kinda boring and once you’ve seen the 4 terrain types there’s not a lot of variation.

At this stage the game’s primary strengths are village building/management IMO. I think the people who are enjoying it the most are getting into the ability to recruit villagers and give them a tasklist to automate resource-gathering and farm management. You start on a large but manageably-sized island, so if you wanted to IDK terraform the whole thing you could reasonably do that.

I don’t want to sink too much time into this one right now, since I’m already hitting the upper limit of what I personally enjoy in these games. It has a way to go and this is apparently a one-man team, but it was fun to play around with.