Code provided with many thanks to Space Goblin Studio.
ASTROBOTANICA is an early-access survival and crafting game. It’s colorful, and it has you helping the alien group of cavemen on the planet you have crash-landed on.
A Strange New World
After crash-landing on a new planet, you start to investigate your surroundings. In order to survive, you will need to scan local flora and fauna, make medicines, and find a way to make sure you get enough CO2 since there isn’t enough in the air for you. There are several different crafting systems, including a medicine maker, building, and planting.
The world around you is colorful and full of plants to scan, and each one has a different use, like healing, stamina, or allowing you to breathe a little bit longer. You are tasked with finding the local intelligent life forms, and they look suspiciously like human beings. A being named Grog has built a hideout in a cave, and he has a mysterious illness.
Once you heal Grog with the local plant life, you will start to slowly become friends with him. You can give him gifts to raise your friendship level while you make sure to keep him healthy.
The map of ASTROBOTANICA is pretty large, but there is currently only a pretty small piece of it available to players. It’s filled with mostly harmless animals and plants; there seems to be currently only one or two plants that will actively deal damage to you when you get close by.
The only meters you need to worry about are stamina, health, and CO2; there are no hunger or thirst meters to keep tabs on. The stamina is pretty brutal; your meter disappears extremely fast and doesn’t refill very fast, if at all on its own. I found that I was constantly needing to fill my pockets with plants to make sure I could run if I needed to.
The Pros and Cons of ASTROBOTANICA
ASTROBOTANICA is a difficult game to get a hold on. The tutorials are verbose and front-loaded, and yet they seem to be missing some important information, like info on how your double jump works or how to avoid attack flowers (If you were wondering, you have to throw items at them to get them to leave you alone). They don’t even really give you a breakdown of what Grog’s illnesses are and how to properly cure them.
Some of the quests aren’t explained very well, and there is no quest menu where you can go and read a description of what you are supposed to be doing. The bag space is ridiculously small for a survival game at the beginning; after unlocking the full first row of the skill tree, I still hadn’t expanded my available space nor was I able to build storage.
While the game is pretty, the sound design is so very, very loud. I needed to have my volume all the way down on my headphones just to be able to stand the constant munching, plants moving, and animal screeches directly in my ears. The music is perfect and at a great volume; it’s mostly the rest of the sounds that I had an issue with.
I am not totally sure, but I think there is a lot in ASTROBOTANICA that I didn’t get to experience because I couldn’t figure out where the final puzzle piece or the final totem piece was. There didn’t seem to be a way to move past these quests either; you only seem to get one quest at a time and nothing more.
What I got to do in the game was fun, if a little frustrating. I had to turn the game off every few hours to get it to stop lagging; I have a pretty decent gaming setup, too, so I’m fairly sure this issue wasn’t on my computer’s end.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think ASTROBOTANICA is not where it needs to be. Even with the grace I usually give to Early Access titles, there is just so much missing from the tutorial and the gameplay that it is hard to make a solid judgment. I look forward to seeing how this game grows as it develops; there are some good bones in place that could make for a fun builder and survival game.
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