Beyond Contact

As a lover of crafting/survival games, I surprisingly had a lot of fun with this one. There are the bones of a really great game here. Maps are random procgen (seeded) and there are four very unique characters to choose from so there's a decent amount of replayability and the core gameplay loop of collect resources - make food - build base is surpsisingly addictive. I finished three runs and found myself wanting to play more. The developer has unfortunately gone defunct, from what I can tell, so there are a couple of minor issues and bugs that will never be fixed, but if you're aware of them then you can definitely have a great time here. (just don't net urchins or plaspods) A lot of the reviews are from Early Access when it was still poorly balanced, but picking this up in 2026 I found this to be very playable. On hard especially, the constant raids keep you on your toes all the time and it really felt like a struggle to survive, so I would definitely suggest familiarizing yourself on Normal before going harder. My main complaint is that farming monster drops can get quite tedious as they take 5 ingame days to respawn, so you're limited by the number of spawns on the map, whic…

I want to like this, but its just crazy tedious. Your oxygen ticks down continuously from full to zero over the course of about 20-25 minutes. This is fine and normal. Your food and water bar "stamina" also ticks down at that exact same rate, and when its empty you take damage and die the same way as if out of oxygen. You basically starve to death every 20 minutes. In order to offset it you have run around searching for scarce food or fighting creatures to gather their parts for food. This is fine but the whole map is covered by aggressive creatures that take offense to your existence, making this tedious. To add on to that, the food you get rots very quickly and your tools break quickly. I spent basically my whole time in this game running around gathering food with a tiny sidequest of progress. Pure tedium. Also the base building is annoying based on where you can build (and those hostile creatures are constantly attacking it) and the inventory management is basically stash things in tiny crates and then hunt around by icon.

This game is a bit of a diamond in the rough. There's plenty of grind here, and a few bugs (I ran into a particular bad bug that caused an inventory slot to become unusable for most of my play through). Where this game shines is the feeling of being isolated on an alien planet. The first few hours are rough with a rapidly depleting food and oxygen bar. Even the health bar doesn't regenerate. It took some trial and error to identify which foods provide the best results for health and food, but that feeling of mastery over the environment was the highlight of the game for me. Exploration is key. You need to find new materials to improve your gear, build out your base, and progress the story. In the early game you'll be running away from enemies more than fighting them, adding to that feeling of being on a hostile planet. Biomes present different challenges, including ambient effects like radiation or spores that interact with different armour sets. I found the inventory size to be a little too restrictive, made worse by the previously mentioned bug. Crafting was a little clunky too and all items also have shockingly low durability. Overall I had fun, but I can understand…

Those who seek effortless immediate "fun" will find no such a thing there Those who want to invest some time and effort, will not be disappointed This game is awesome - very high quality and fully voiced Music is something outstanding and feels impossible in our time, as it strongly reminds of music from Soviet space cartoons True space fairy tale as it should be, we probably will not see anything like this for many years Update Finished the story mode on Normal difficulty, and I'm *raptured* This game has everything right. Enemies are tough and dangerous, but manageable. Food pressure and environmental hazards are deadly, but manageable. Almost nothing becomes obsolete. Base building is strictly functional, no decorations available. Story is very good, characters are very kind and warm to each other, as they should be given the circumstances. This game is not about decorating your base and petting animals, as I originally thought. This game is about WAR.

Playing this game was a nightmare.... This is the worst game that I have ever played.... the gameplay is the real issue, because the story is rather decent and for a strange reason I do like the planet :P Managing the inventory is a nightmare, because the inventory is quite limited, but the real issue is how upgrades work and how the oxygen works. You have very little oxygen and even using the best vest you'll still run a lot around the map for oxygen spots... but the good part is that you can build different bases in different spots and teleport between them :P I have no idea why someone would design a very very annoying and restrictive mechanic and call it "Inovation". To be honest the rest of the game is not that bad if you ignore the oxygen issues. Because the inventory is quite small, you'll need to run around a lot, building a big base is not that possible because there's little space to build but you can focus on multiple bases or different spots. Power is not an issue, I used only wind turbines and all went ok. Crafting is a little bit confusing also because you need to have all the storages around the crafting table, but that is something that I sort it quite early and…

An unusual game about survival on an alien planet! Many negative reviews claim players didn't know what to do - I felt that's what the game is about. It may be not a game to relax after work because you need to investigate a lot, but once you get a hold of the basics it turns out to be a world crafted with love, innovation and great music. Would recommend!