After The Escapists series, Team 17 is taking us away from prison and is now stranding you on an island instead. Set in the same universe for as much as it matters, you wake up washed up on a beach. It’s up to you to scavenge, gather and harvest whatever you can on your new island home. You’ll need to craft yourself tools, weapons, and a place to rest your head. Are you a survivor?

In The Survivalists you find yourself on a top down island in The Escapists visual style. Daylight is fleeting and there’s pebbles, flowers and berries just waiting to be collected. You better get to work and start crafting, without a bed and light the island animals will make short work of you. Combine your pebbles to make an axe head to chop down some trees, and make a wooden bat to kill the actual bats. Make sure you keep your stomach full with berries as you want to keep your health up.  

When you start crafting you only have access to the basics, eking out a living on the island. Not everything is hostile on the island, early on you’ll come across a Monkey. Give them what they want and you’ll have a chum to train to do whatever you can do. Team 17 have given a lot of focus on these monkey companions. If you like quirky stuff like helper monkeys, then you’re the target audience. You must train your newfound simian friends. The game can be unclear if the monkey is learning from your commands - you tell it to mimic your actions. When you do get the hang of it you can train up the monkeys to do a multitude of actions. Just note it is much harder than it should be, especially the larger your group.

One of the best uses of your monkeys is to have one of them carry a chest around so you can store stuff on the go. This becomes important because your carrying capacity is always too little, given how many crafting materials you need most of the time. The monkeys are handy to have on board when it all works, although once you have them trained up to fight alongside you it can make you a little too overpowered. Descending on your enemies as a group, you completely overwhelm them. Although at the same time it’s not the worst thing, given the combat itself isn’t a part I enjoyed and didn’t really want to engage with any more than necessary. 

Combat feels slow. It could be deliberate, stamina is fleeting and fights come down to if you have enough stamina refill to land the killing blow. At least when you die you don’t necessarily lose everything, get back to where you died and you can regain everything you were carrying. Of course when it’s in an enemy-dense area it isn’t the easiest task, but it’s not exactly punishing.

You might think it is all over when you get a raft together to find your way back home. Not so fast! Your raft allows you to travel to other islands with different biomes as you continue on your journey. I didn’t pick up on this as quick as I’d like, spending some time focussing on building up a home base and trying to eke out a living for myself. The procedurally-generated island chain has a few different biomes to explore as well as plenty of creatures and people who want you dead. It’s not just about making your own place and foraging for food that will keep you alive. You will have to be prepared to fight and explore some dangerous areas if you want to thrive on the island. 

Being able to get a change of scenery provides a pleasant variety from the island that you’ll spend plenty of time on as you work on being a master builder. Through my exploring I came across crashed planes, Orc houses and temples, all waiting for me to bumble my way through as I steal anything not nailed down. You’ll also come across messages in bottles and treasure maps to help keep you distracted from your main goal. You can find more powerful items from chests or navigating the temples/dungeons, although most of what I found was never that good to make it worth the fighting. As much as there can be a main goal, what will you do once you actually escape? You can’t take it all with you, is it all about the monkeys we trained along the way? At this point in time The Survivalists feels aimless. There’s stuff to do, but the payoff isn’t that rewarding. If the goal is to escape the islands then you wouldn’t need to build up so much when you’ll leave it all behind. I found the game hinges a lot more on you making your own entertainment, gathering, building and training. It’s all about having yourself a nice set up for staying.

Throughout my time surviving I was often reminded of survival sim Don’t Starve. Waking up out in the wild as you rush to harvest what you can before night encroaches and the creatures in the darkness come for you. It was enjoyable doing all this in The Survivalists too, if not a little familiar. It is still an enjoyable genre when done right. Team 17 have managed to build on The Escapists to give fans a new game that changes the formula while retaining that distinct visual style. Although The Survivalists still lacks the same bite that Don’t Starve and others have, when you die you wake back up in bed and get back to work, even your inventory is still around. At first I played very carefully not being aware of this, not wanting to lose all my hard work. Once I realised I just respawn back at my camp it took all the risk out of it. 

Instead of being forced to make the most of limited resources the island refreshes after several days, it’s hard to starve when I could collect so much food. On one hand I appreciate that I can play and not be forced to start all over, but on the other hand it strips all of the urgency and tension survival games carry.

Crafting is a key part of island living and building up not only a base of operations, but keeping it protected. Every few days your home away from home will be under attack, raiding your camp. You can build up your base with blueprints that set up the foundation for what you want to build. Then all you need to do is provide the resources to complete the blueprint. 

Managing your inventory so you can hold crafted items is a mess. As usual with this genre you have a limited carrying capacity. Given you’re essentially gathering anything that you can get your hands on, capacity becomes limited fast. This is felt particularly early on, when you’re trying to get established and the crafting options open up fast. I’m not entirely sure what could be done to handle this better, it’s an important part of the survival aspect of this genre. It’s frustrating, I’m already crafting axe handles from a handful of pebbles and training monkeys, it’s hardly a super serious survival sim.

You may in fact not be the sole survivor of the shipwreck. With Co op you can have four players on the island, along with 5 of your monkey friends (per survivor). Given the open, make your own adventure approach, the more to share in the adventure the merrier. 

The Survivalists is a decent survival game and follow up to The Escapists. It’s fun while it lasts, your mileage will vary on how much you enjoy training monkeys and how badly you want to stay on the islands. Inventory management, a lack of consequence, and trying to train monkeys aren’t highlights. Underpinning everything is a light hearted survival game, if you’re looking for a less punishing time and an emphasis on monkeys. Team 17 already has a roadmap for future additions to the game, and if a lot of that was present at launch this would be a very different review. At least there is a bright future for The Survivalists and I look forward to seeing what it has to offer on the horizon.