Games that drop you into a world and then let you do whatever you can work out, those always draw me in, from the lack of direction, story or even mechanics, trying to work out what is going on and more importantly, what I need to do, is always a blast. It also helps that while there are dozens of them released all the time, there are only a few that catch my eye and from the moment that Len’s Island was revealed, it was one of them. Now that the game has launched into early access, was my hope for an island paradise, right?

If you have played Minecraft, or any other game in the survival genre, then you will have a solid foundation for what to do here, gather resources, expand your base of operations, explore, rest and then repeat. The core gameplay loop is the same, where it differs is that you're not technically alone in your adventure, while you do start off on your own, once you've obtained enough resources to start repairing nearby bridges, you can head into a village and start trading with the folks there. Trading is really all you can do at the beginning, because you won't have enough a cash or resources to buy bigger items, but it does give you a goal for the end of the day, and that's probably something that the game needs a little more of, a plan.

This is not to say of course that things are broken, but there is almost no context to any of the locations you can explore or items that you can obtain, there's no lore or logbook that records your adventures, you have to do that yourself. What this means is that if you come across a monolith that has a symbol etched on its surface, you can't make a note of it to ask in town about it, in fact all the ones that I discovered I couldn't even interact with. This could be a limitation with the games early access period and is something for the road map, making them interactive down the line, or it could just be they have no significant meaning whatsoever, and therein lies the problem, no context.

If you step away from the archaeological side of Len’s Island, you can actually spend a fair amount of time gathering resource is on land, chopping down trees, busting open rocks, gathering plants, the list is kind of endless. Once you've started obtaining a good portion of resources, you can then start to build yourself up a place to call home, there are a number of locations that have some walls, or maybe a roof, that you can go in and take over and just finalise the rest of it, or you can simply start fresh in any location you choose. I made the comparison to Minecraft before and that's purely because it has one of the most simplistic building systems of any game in the genre, and many others attempted to overcomplicate it, Len’s Island does not do that.

The system is straight forward, if you want to put down a foundation block, you can place it anywhere as long as there's nothing blocking where it might go, which includes tree stumps, rocks and even yourself. Once that's in place, building up from there is literally a snap, because every wall, doorframe, architectural flourish and staircase, will all snap into position based off the corresponding pieces around it. Placing furniture down such as beds and tables, can be a little finicky at times, but even that still is more approachable than many other games that offer something similar. What it all boils down too, is if you have the resources and a clear space to build you don't need to study architecture to make it happen, though I do advise having a plan of what you want before you start placing things down.

But this is called Len’s Island not Len’s Happy Home Designer, and the island has secrets, some of them can be found by simply wandering the shoreline, where you'll find glass and flotsam from ships gone past, you may even find an abandoned house or two. The big secrets though, lies in the cave system located somewhere on the island and once you find it the lure of exploration will draw you in, but you're gonna have to be ready, because there are things that lurk in the dark. The cave system is a little unique and that there are branching paths, items to be discovered, resource is to find, that only be found within its dark interior, but it's the countless enemies that will challenge you. Len is not a particularly agile person, to begin with your only weapon is a little dagger and while you can take on the very small enemies without too much of a hassle, the larger ones will prove to be more of a threat than you might be able to handle.

I was able to takedown one of them without too much hassle, but in the dark, there are these growths, that will start to spawn them and one such growth was actually spawning them faster than I could kill them with my little dagger, so I made the very important decision, to run the hell away. That sent me back into town to see if I could find a new weapon, to help me out in combat and while there was a blacksmith who did have a mace available, the cost was just insane and even venturing down to the pirate town didn't have a good series of options for me either, but I did discover I could build a workbench which could let me build my own weapons.

With a spear I was ready to give it another go, so I ventured back in and managed to get further into the cave system, but I quickly discovered another problem, my backpack only has so much room, for so many things and as much fun as it was mining for rocks if I couldn't carry them out it made no sense to keep doing it. Back at my little Chateau that I created, I had my workbench, a table and chair, a bed, all the necessities of island living, but I had no way of storing any of the resources that I had collected and it left me in a problem, I can keep exploring but without having a need to collect things what's the point and while folks in the town would take things off my hands, such as flowers and scrap steel, those weren't the resource is I was gaining a lot of.

So, this brought me to my big concern with the game, progression, at the moment without a lack of clear context or the ability to store items, it doesn't seem like I can push too far forward. I can of course continue to explore the cave system and I have done that many times, but as the enemies tend to respawn quite quickly inside it, I needed to keep getting food so I could recharge myself on the go, which then requires cash and we're back to the whole cycle of getting resources.

Now of course it is very early days in the games lifecycle, it's only been out in early access for a few days and while many players have created incredible looking houses and discovered more of the cave system than I have, until the game gets more content, I am going to have to pause my island getaway.