Happy Halloween, everybody! It has been a slow week here on SassyG. Yes, I am giving it a nickname. My Halloween plans are the same as my usual plans. Eat food, sit in front of my laptop like an upturned turtle, and play games. That brings us to the subject of today’s impressions review: Eden Crafters!
Big thanks to the developers at Osaris Games for providing us with a copy. It launched earlier in October for 20 dollars, and it makes for an interesting base building experience. It might be Early Access, but Eden Crafters has a fair amount of polish and content. This has become increasingly important in the last couple of years for games with that Early Access tag. With so much choice out there, a great first impression is essential to stand out amongst competitors. In these ambitious base-building and crafting games, having a stable launch with plenty of content is especially vital. That does not mean the game is technically flawless, but for such an ambitious scope, I expected more bugs than I have found.
Eden Crafters is very reminiscent of The Planet Crafter, an excellent terraforming game that left Early Access earlier this year. By playing both, you can see where Osaris Games got their inspiration from, and I do not mean that as a detriment. All the core systems are in place: survival and resource management, building, crafting, all those gubbins.
There’s food, water and oxygen to manage, though they are relatively simple. Planet Crafter as a survival game is reasonably kind to you, and making more stuff like water bottles is as simple as a single click. Oxygen is the big one, and running out of it quickly turns into a platformer when you’re scrambling to run back to safety before collapsing into a drowning puddle. It makes for some harrowing experiences, although there are a few difficulty modes you can change at any time.
It’s a slow burn game, but the gameplay loop is enjoyable without being overwhelming. Like in Planet Crafter, your goal is to terraform the planet into something suitable for human habitation.
Scavenging the planet for resources is important: there are plenty of raw minerals essential for survival and building. Shipwrecks and ruins can be scavenged for resources and important blueprints, so there’s always an incentive for exploration: another thing Eden Crafters does well. I enjoy making little outposts everywhere, making sure I have a safe haven when I need to get some oxygen back. Improving and upgrading my gear allows for more options, and it’s done in an organic way which shouldn’t annoy the player too much. Meteor showers dynamically change the landscape, providing rare resources at random as well.
The game is still a bit grindy, and I wish the building mechanics were slightly more refined. While the game is more polished than I expected, I also experienced quite a few bugs such as my buildings suddenly vanishing, although they seemed to reappear again when I flicked between Drone mode and back to my avatar in-game. I also wish the game had a manual save feature, although that is more of a quality of life improvement.
It is early days, but I am enjoying Eden Crafters a lot so far. Out of all these survival crafting games, the idea of molding a lifeless rock into a garden appeals to me the most. Eden Crafters is not as polished or as robust as Planet Crafter, but there is a lot to like with it. I would recommend holding off buying it until some of these more troublesome bugs are fixed, but Eden Crafters has a promising future. Keep an eye on it!
