CHENNAI: Somewhere deep inside me is the brain of a squirrel. This part of me loves collecting items, and burrowing them into neat little piles in my house. It’s why I love survival sandbox games so much. Usually, to survive in these games, you must hoard food and gather raw materials.
You can’t hold them all in your hands, so you do also need to organise them into boxes, to use them as the need arises. There’s not much else to do, really. Because the only achievement in survival sandbox is staying alive… Or dying less frequently.
But if you, reader, have played survival sandbox games for as long as I have, you will know that the secret goal is actually to build the safest, largest, and prettiest homestead that can ever exist within the harsh lands. So if you ask me why ‘Core Keeper’ has already managed to suck a lot of my time, this is my explanation: I just wanted to build a house, decorate it, and surround it with a large, self-sustaining farm.
Now Core Keeper just has one difference from your typical sandbox game — in that it does not have a day-night cycle. Usually, you use these cycles to do different things. During the days, you spend time exploring, mining, and gathering items. The night times are for retreating to a little den and camping with your fire out, so that evil creatures don’t spawn around you. You might even spend the night organising items, understanding the crafting system, and preparing for the next day.
Not having a sense of time makes exploration less structured, and a lot more open-ended and chaotic. And I kind of love that. You see, unlike similar games like ‘Minecraft’, and ‘Don’t Starve’, we never do see the sky in Core Keeper. We start out in a cavern, and dig through it the whole way.
Every starting world in the game is procedurally generated, but it does have similar boss monsters to start with. At the beginning, you encounter this huge ball of slime — called Glurch the Abominable Mass, which keep pounding on the grounds. It gets quite annoying, because you can’t quite ignore the earth shaking beneath you several clicks away from the monster. Defeating the monsters is key in progressing in the game, but there’s enough to do even otherwise.
This is quite the nerdy thing to like in a game, but I appreciate how easy the skill tree was to navigate. At the beginning, Core Keeper allows you to choose between different character types, and gives you a little leg up to be the expert at that specific thing. That skill could be mining, magic, gardening, or even cooking — setting you up to be a very good Miner, Mage, Gardener or Chef. However, it doesn’t restrict you to building abilities within just that skill. You might find yourself naturally inclined to explore, and that might lead you to developing the explorer skills with ease.
As you dig your way sideways through other parts of the map, the game also reveals new biomes. While we start out with the “mushroom” biome, which has an invasive fungal overgrowth, we also find meadows with animals, underground oceans, and ancient ruins. This biome diversity does make it sound a lot like Minecraft, but the big difference being that it’s very 2-dimensional — you can move in the four cardinal directions, but not dig down or climb up.
Core Keeper has been in early access for a while, but made the full official release only last month. If you’re a bit bored with Minecraft at the moment, Core Keeper is a great alternate. The cooperative mode allows for up to eight players to interact in the same world. It is currently available on the PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation.