Best Robinsonade games?

[Erkki]

So Minecraft has basically spawned a new genre or ten. I'm interested in the best survival games with crafting and improving technology. I think it's fair to call them Robinsonades, if these elements are present.

 

Anyway, I've been ignoring the genre after loving Minecraft for a while. I played Terraria as well, but I think that has a strong platforming element, which kind of distracts from being a Robinsonade. I have heard a lot about Don't Starve, and have bought The Long Dark, and played a tiny bit, but didn't get that much into it yet. Mostly interested in first-person, single-player ones. Any recommendations?

[Bjorn]

I'm a real big fan of Don't Starve, it's easily one of my favorite games from the last 5 years.  I've generally avoided a lot of the first person ones, because it seems like all the ones I know about have ended up in Early Access hell, just kind of continuing forever without reaching a finished state (I may be wrong about that, but it's my impression). 

 

Oh, and there's Miasmata, which the Thumbs were enamored with for awhile, but I don't know that they ever got that far in it.  I started a game of it, and really liked what I saw, but got distracted and never went back. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

I just started Miasmata today! I would not suggest it here as much. It's more directed with an intended throughline than it is about general exploratory play. That said I'm enjoying it a ton but partly because it doesn't do what a lot these Robinsoes do, and I don't enjoy a lot about them normally so the changes are much more engaging to me.

I actually felt pretty uninterested in Don't Starve. It seemed to be very crafting focused and I have never found any game that made me give a shit about crafting. The total loss of progress every time just frustrated me too (though I assume after a point of progress I could have saved to some extent).

[Ben X]

I'd never heard of the term Robinsonades, thank you! Why "-ade", though? Is that a standard German suffix?

[Bjorn]

I actually felt pretty uninterested in Don't Starve. It seemed to be very crafting focused and I have never found any game that made me give a shit about crafting. The total loss of progress every time just frustrated me too (though I assume after a point of progress I could have saved to some extent).

 

I think the best parts of DS have been about exploration and discovery for me, though the experience could definitely go the way of focusing on crafting as well.  The worst part is probably food production, which can take up a fair amount of time until you get a good garden/system going. 

[Ninety-Three]

I think the best parts of DS have been about exploration and discovery for me, though the experience could definitely go the way of focusing on crafting as well.  The worst part is probably food production, which can take up a fair amount of time until you get a good garden/system going. 

 

I always shortcutted that entire affair by just exploring until I found an area with Tallbirds to farm. Plus, throw in some drying racks and their meat will keep you topped up on health and sanity as well. As I say this I realize that my playstyle bypasses most of the resource management/survival aspects of that game, and I wonder if that's a good thing.

[bakelite]

The Forest is probably the least incomplete early access survival thing. It alternates between long periods of peaceful exploration and hectic battles with mutated cannibals in a really effective way.

[Erkki]

I'd never heard of the term Robinsonades, thank you! Why "-ade", though? Is that a standard German suffix?

Hmm, dunno. In Estonian it's Robinsonaad so I found (guessed) the English term from that. I haven't also actually seen the English term used much. I even googled it and didn't find anybody put this word together with the survival genre games, so I even thought about changing it to something else for a second.

[Gormongous]

Hmm, dunno. In Estonian it's Robinsonaad so I found (guessed) the English term from that. I haven't also actually seen the English term used much. I even googled it and didn't find anybody put this word together with the survival genre games, so I even thought about changing it to something else for a second.

 

-esque, -ish, and -like are the most common suffixes for the meaning for which you're shooting, I think. I'm not against using another language than English for our neologisms, though.

[clyde]

I've enjoyed my time in Rust, but I haven't played it in a while. I probably go in twice a year to wander around, build a few tools, and get killed. It sounds like it's not enjoyable, but I enjoy those adventures. The development-progress and accumulated creations of other players always provide me with a sense of discovery and danger. The way I am, I don't think the loss of progress is what keeps me from playing robinsonades so much as the crafting-chains that I feel the need to understand. I have had moments where I was excited about the crafting-rhetoric of a game though; I can't remember a specific example but I enjoy seeing that a game's crafting-system has recipes that make sense in entertaining ways.

There's a game I know little about that just had a successful kickstarter called Eco and I haven't played it and know little, but the concept interests me. They claim that the game will have an interdependent ecosystem that players affect through the production of craft. Players on a server will then (assumably) vote on laws that the game itself enforces. What's clever about this is that they claim to encourage players to specialize in their specific craft. So if I hunt bunnies for my crafting materials, but the brick-maker's factory is polluting and that destroys the bunny habitat, then we have conflicting vested interests. It sound really interesting to me, but who knows if I will ever play it. It sounds like the kind of game I would have to enter, knowing that it has to be played for 10 hours a week. Right now I play games that I think will only take me 10 minutes even though I may end up playing them for hours.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1037798999/eco-global-survival-game

[Deadpan]

Personally I call the genre scarcity simulators, which covers any game interested in disempowering you as a player and making you struggle to maintain your current state instead of growing ever more powerful. It's not ideal, because in a lot of games going in this direction (typically the ones I'm less interested in) it turns out that it's actually fairly easy to deal with basic needs and that the experience is actually about some other thing that exists on top of that system and taking care of yourself is simply something you need to do to access that. Like social interaction and building in all those crafty, online survival games, or combat, or narrative, or exploration.

 

The Long Dark I've not enjoyed all that much because, at least in the areas I've seen so far, survival items are relatively plentiful and they've kind of tried to introduce difficulty through an abundance of absurdly aggressive wolves instead.

 

I really, really like Out There though, even though that's another one of these cases where you do grow ever more powerful if things go well. Although in this case it mainly affects how easily you can travel around. I love that there's just flat out no combat at all in this game. There are enemies, but you can't engage them and don't have to run from them, you just can't go to where they are. Also you slowly learn alien languages, which is nice.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Thus is apparently the thread for me to poop on games but I have big reservations about Out There. The game devolved into luck and swapping out materials in an overly simply system for me. And the narrative never really paid off, the aliens all have very simple prescribed speech and no actual culture to speak of. The endings all fell flat and those were the only real story points. Does anyone know if their updated edition made a big difference?

[Twig]

It's still super early and incomplete but this is the one that appeals to me most without having played it.

 

http://oortonline.com/

 

I honestly couldn't tell you why...

[Twig]

There's a game I know little about that just had a successful kickstarter called Eco and I haven't played it and know little, but the concept interests me. They claim that the game will have an interdependent ecosystem that players affect through the production of craft. Players on a server will then (assumably) vote on laws that the game itself enforces. What's clever about this is that they claim to encourage players to specialize in their specific craft. So if I hunt bunnies for my crafting materials, but the brick-maker's factory is polluting and that destroys the bunny habitat, then we have conflicting vested interests. It sound really interesting to me, but who knows if I will ever play it. It sounds like the kind of game I would have to enter, knowing that it has to be played for 10 hours a week. Right now I play games that I think will only take me 10 minutes even though I may end up playing them for hours.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1037798999/eco-global-survival-game

Wow this does seem neat, also the end of the video with a meteor about to crash into the planet basically sold me on the game.

[Cordeos]

I have really been enjoying Subnautica.  Its by the same people who made Natural Selection 2. The game is currently in early access, but is getting regularly patched and is coming along nicely. They just released a patch greatly expanding on the smaller submarine and are now working on a new biome. 

 

The game is set on an ocean world where you are they only survivor of a space ship crash. You are always managing your oxygen while scavenging for scarce resources. There is an optional hunger and thirst system that I don't play with due to it not being fully fleshed out yet. There is a constant drive to go to deeper and more dangerous biomes to unlock new technology and get better resources. Because you spend most of your time underwater there is an added layer of threat because the predatory fish could be anywhere around you. The devs have also made the decision to make fighting the predatory fish very difficult. Your knife does very little damage and is more useful in driving the fish off than actually killing it. There are other weapons that let you push fish away from you or temporarily freeze or trap them. Currently the only good way to kill hostile creatures is to ram them with the larger submarine.

Something that annoyed me at first, but makes a lot of sense in making the game more difficult is that items in your inventory do not stack. This slows down resource gathering pretty well.

[Twig]

It's still super early and incomplete but this is the one that appeals to me most without having played it.

 

http://oortonline.com/

 

I honestly couldn't tell you why...

Thinking on it some more, it may be because it looks like how I wish Minecraft looked, visually.

 

Like this is, to me, absolutely gorgeous.

 

 

I love Minecraft, but I could never get it to look like that, no matter how many shader or performance mods I used. It just runs like crap if I try to do anything fancy with it. \:

 

Granted, that may be a bit of a bullshot. I don't know. Like I said, I haven't played it. D:

[Bjorn]

Wow, that looks really good. It reminds me of some of the shots from 3D Dot Game Heroes (which is still probably my favorite looking voxel game). 

[aoanla]

-esque, -ish, and -like are the most common suffixes for the meaning for which you're shooting, I think. I'm not against using another language than English for our neologisms, though.

 

Sure, but -ade is not unknown (see, for example, "Edisonade" as a term for early-19th-century-style SF with an inventor hero clearly channelling the folk-myth version of Edison). I think it works well with the period that Robinson Crusoe is written in to use a somewhat older suffix, like -ade.

[Jordan A]

Crusoguelike.

[Bjorn]

Crusoguelike.

 

[Erkki]

-esque, -ish, and -like are the most common suffixes for the meaning for which you're shooting, I think. I'm not against using another language than English for our neologisms, though.

No, it's an English word, look it up.

[Ben X]

Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to suggest Erkki had coined the term - that was done "by the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel in the Preface of his 1731 work Die Insel Felsenburg (The Island Stronghold)", which is why I was wondering whether -ade was a typical German suffix, it didn't feel very German to me. But I just found this:

 

http://www.canoo.net/services/WordformationRules/Derivation/To-N/Suffixe-F/ade.html?lang=en

 

Anyway, sorry, it was pretty off-topic and pointless!

[Gormongous]

No, it's an English word, look it up.

 

You're right, I misspoke. It's a suffix used to adapt French and Spanish words into nouns, but that doesn't make it a loanword itself.

[osmosisch]

How about Crusoeade then? I like the mish-mash of vowels all blobbed together in the centre there.

[Erkki]

Drop some wovels and it's just a crusade. Anyway, I'm now kind of curious about Sub-nautica, and sad to hear that wolves ruin The Long Dark I guess I might have to give Don't Starve a try after all.