Exploring Solarpunk: A Cosy Survival Adventure

solarpunk

Author’s Note: A game key for Solarpunk was kindly provided by Mark Allen PR

Welcome to Solarpunk, the highly anticipated survival game from Cyberwave. After several years in the making, it is finally here. Players will find themself in a world that is described as technically advanced with the ability to explore many distant islands. You can play with friends or on your own. Players can also grow and harvest crops, create a variety of buildings, craft gadgets and explore to their heart’s content.

However, Solarpunk is more than that.

It’s a cosier, slower-paced survival game. A place where you can create your base, a farm with crops and animals, automation features or even just hang out with others. Don’t forget your trusty airship too! There’s no right or wrong way to play Solarpunk, and there’s always plenty to explore.

Solarpunk Release Trailer

Curious to find out a little bit more about Solarpunk? Then why not take a look at the game’s launch trailer below?

So, what did you think? Looks good, right?

The Start of an Adventure

Loading up Solarpunk for the first time, you are greeted by a setup screen as such. This allows you to name your world. In my case I called my world ‘Leektopia’, followed by what kind of game you want to play.

You have two different choices for your survival adventure. The first being the standard default survival experience where you have the default hunger and thirst consumption, you drop your inventory if you die however, you must recover it, and lightning can hit and hurt you.

Alternatively, you can play the soft survival experience, where your hunger and thirst are combined and less than the standard experience, you don’t drop your inventory, and lightning cannot hurt you.

For my playthrough, I chose the standard experience. I also ensured that I selected shared progress, which is just under your world name. This means I can play Solarpunk both on my PC and Steam Deck freely.

Solarpunk world build screen

Tutorial Times

Now with the basics out the way, it was straight into the five-step tutorial.

This took me about half an hour to complete and allowed me to acquaint myself with the game’s features. The different tools, planting crops, researching, building a crafting table, gathering, and building my first home for my bed. I also went around exploring as much of the starting island as I could to get a feel for where things are and what I can do while I’m there. It’s early days but a start.

Now that the tutorial was complete, I was on my way to explore more of what Solarpunk has to offer. With a small, messy base starting to take shape, my next quest was to figure out what to do next.

Bright Horizons Await

When I say this, I mean it. Harvest all the raspberries you can find, and make sure you replant any of the seeds you also get as soon as you get them. While hunger doesn’t drain incredibly fast, you’ll want to make sure you have some kind of food source at hand at all times.

Anyway, with that aside, it’s time to start exploring the Solarpunk world properly.

My first task was to start unlocking the different items on the research table so that I could level it up and unlock the next tier. This was actually quite fun and easy to do, and soon my base was starting to fill up with beehives, a well to collect water for my growing crops, a rain catcher for drinking water and, soon enough, a furnace.

Before I knew it, I was well on my way working through and unlocking the different tiers. It was a little bit of trial and error thinking outside of the box to find out what materials did what, but we got there in the end.

Then, I died in the game for the first time due to my hunger and thirst levels. I simply didn’t have enough raspberries or water to keep my character going. Luckily I respawned directly at my base and quickly retrieved my inventory before I set off once again.

The focus, the airship landing dock.

I had some work to do with finding and gathering resources before I could craft the airship landing dock, so with that done, it was time to set sail and explore new islands.

What would I find? Who knows. Hopefully some more food options as well as more resources to help continue growing what I can build. Sadly a thunderstorm caught me by surprise, so I quickly retreated on my first trip until it passed.

Okay, back on task now that the storm has passed, and now I found myself chipping away at gathering resources, discovering some new islands, new opportunities and a cute little island shop which allows me to pick up my first advanced bit of technology. Now I’m certainly on the road to automating my island in various ways and growing my collection of animals.

Steam vs Steam Deck

I played Solarpunk on both my PC and Steam Deck thanks to the game’s shared progress feature. It’s been nice switching between the two so easily thanks to Steam Cloud. I haven’t seen any problems switching between the two at all at any point.

I did experience a couple of small crashes on PC initially in my first few hours of playing however, touch wood, they appear to have stopped now. They didn’t hinder my game progress at all, but I did send a bug report to the team just to be on the safe side.

Initial First Impressions of Solarpunk

Well, what can I say? I can see exactly why Solarpunk is a breath of fresh air when it comes to survival style games. It’s cosy, it’s peaceful, it’s low stress and there’s no pressure to rush or force yourself through the game. It doesn’t hold your hand but gently guides you through the game when you need it.

There’s no right or wrong way to play Solarpunk and truthfully, I spent so much time just harvesting resources to be prepared for researching table and building in general.

I wouldn’t say I had a rocky start to the game, it was quite smooth for the most part. It was more balancing my food and water resources, but the more I progressed through the game and unlocked more objects, the easier this became. All part of the learning curve.

I’ve had a lot of fun with the game so far, and I’m excited to continue building and growing my island. There’s still plenty to learn and discover, but things are taking shape very nicely.

This is certainly a game I can see myself playing more so on Steam Deck, cosied up on the sofa after a long day, but also one that I’ll be chipping away at over time. One where the speed I play through the game doesn’t matter I can just play and explore to my heart’s content.

While Solarpunk doesn’t have any form of combat, PvP, competitive multiplayer, huge engaging storylines or anything like that, what the game does well is turn a survival game into a peaceful and calming adventure. Created by a small indie team, you can really see how much time and passion they’ve put into the game. So, thank you to the Cyberwave team for creating such a wonderful experience.

Solarpunk is out now across multiple platforms, including Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox and Nintendo Switch 2.

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Published by Krista

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