Solarpunk

Survival games have spent the last decade competing over who can make you more miserable — hunger meters, corpse runs, base raids, punishing nights. Solarpunk, the debut game from two-person German studio Cyberwave, spent four years and a successful Kickstarter campaign betting that a meaningful slice of the audience was tired of that framing entirely. Judging by the million-plus wishlists it racked up before launch and the Very Positive reception it’s held onto since, that bet has paid off.

The pitch is disarmingly simple: you live on a chain of floating islands in a world that solved its environmental problems with technology rather than abandoning it, and your job is to build a home, grow food, automate a few chores, and explore by airship. There’s no combat, no PvP, no base attacks, and — pointedly — no story campaign pushing you toward anything in particular. What structure exists, you’re expected to supply yourself.

A survival game that isn’t trying to hurt you

The renewable energy system is Solarpunk’s clearest mechanical hook. Wind and solar generation actually respond to in-game weather, batteries need managing, and wireless power distribution turns your base’s electrical layout into a genuine design puzzle rather than a coat of paint over generic crafting stations. It’s the one system here with real depth to dig into, and it’s the strongest evidence the small team behind this knew exactly what they wanted the game’s identity to be.

The airship does similar work for exploration. Each player builds and upgrades their own, and travel between islands is treated as a small event worth savoring rather than a menu transition — a smart choice in a genre that too often makes traversal feel like downtime between the parts that matter. The islands themselves are handcrafted rather than procedurally generated, and it shows: each one has a sense of place that generated content usually can’t match, even if that also means the two biomes available at launch will feel familiar again well before you’ve exhausted everything else there is to do.

Cozy, but not empty

Cyberwave has been upfront that Solarpunk is a small, focused experience rather than an attempt to out-scale Valheim or Ark — most players report clearing the main content in around twenty hours before shifting into open-ended base-building and decoration. That’s an honest scope, and the game mostly earns it: animal care built around coexistence rather than exploitation, drone-based automation that meaningfully cuts down on busywork, and up to four-player co-op that gives friends genuinely different things to do rather than just more hands doing the same chore.

Where it thins out is exactly where you’d expect from a self-directed sandbox with no story hooks: solo play can go quiet once the opening island’s mysteries are mapped, and once automation takes over the early resource loop, gathering starts to repeat itself rather than deepen. The lack of crossplay is also a real practical limitation for a co-op-focused game — if your group isn’t all on the same platform, you’re not playing together.

Verdict

Solarpunk set out to prove a cozy, low-stakes take on survival crafting could still feel purposeful, and for the most part it does — the energy systems have real depth, the airship makes exploration feel earned, and the whole thing avoids the genre’s usual punishing instincts without becoming empty in the process. Thin solo pacing, only two launch biomes, and gathering loops that flatten out with automation keep it from greatness, but for $22.99 from a two-person studio’s debut, this is a genuinely easy recommendation for anyone who wants their survival game to relax them instead of stress them out.