A realization hit me while playing a pre-release build of Icarus, the new survival game from Rocketwerkz and DayZ creator Dean Hall: it’s been a while since I felt like a survival game was actually about surviving. For me, the staples of rugged outdoor living were all there in Icarus, layered over the strange mystery of the unsuccessfully terraformed world that makes up its sci-fi setting.
Icarus plants you on the surface of a new world without much more than your wits and a sealed suit. Each Prospect (the name for a discrete session) of Icarus is real-world time limited, from days to weeks, and before the Prospect is over you have to make it back to your drop pod or your character and all their stuff is done for. Finding food, water, and oxygen to survive is up to you, as is shelter from the deadly storms that rack the surface. The only thing going for you is your drop pod: It brings you down and it’ll take you back up to orbit—along with your inventory—when you’re done.
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Naturally, the first thing I did when arriving on Icarus was almost kill my only ally. I’d just sat down with the game and joined a new drop with Hall. Loading in, I was greeted by the roaring engine of my drop pod descending, and as it clunked to the ground I heard him laughing over voice chat. “Yep… you… hit me,” he said. “I was too close to the drop ship, I’m nearly dead.”
Hall set out to find some berries so he can get a bit of health back while I find my bearings. We spend a bit doing basic survival game stuff: Find rocks, find wood, make primitive tools. It’s all pretty familiar, but it’s also high-fidelity compared to past games. “We wanted to start you out in what was very familiar,” said Hall, “I think that’s sort of the secret sauce for a survival game, to take you from the familiar to the unfamiliar.”
I was impressed, frankly, because it looked good even on the older graphics card I was running for this demo, a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti.
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Not everything was too normal. I found some bluish minerals, high in oxygen content, which had to be burnt to release the gas and refill my tanks. Hall shows me how to learn new recipes and how to spend my talent points, all gained as I level up, to unlock the survival essentials. The blueprint points get you new stuff to build, while the talent points get you nice perks: more stamina, more health, faster movement. Or more esoteric things.
My favorite? “Running with a knife,” which makes you faster with a knife out.
I liked that about Icarus a lot: It had a good clip. I was consistently unlocking new blueprint points, new talents, and doing new things. There were always a few things I had unlocked but hadn’t experimented with yet.
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I’ve played quite a bit of Rockwerkz’ Stationeers, which they’ve been iterating on in Early Access for about four years now. Stationeers focuses on the minutiae of survival, the hard technical specs, but Icarus was more about the general shape of surviving. Nonetheless, the attention to detail made it feel good: You had to stalk animals, and aim carefully, to take them out before they could run. Cooking around a hot fire on an already hot day made heat exhaustion worse. It even had my most-disliked part of hunting: Carrying a dead deer somewhere better than wherever it fell.
The details weren’t just in survival, but in construction and crafting too. Falling trees were dangerous things, taking down other trees and battering structures. Building a simple lean-to for shelter was easy, but building a more elaborate cabin required foundation work, framing, and a whole grove of trees. I needed that bigger cabin, I quickly realized, so that I’d have space for all the tools and workbenches for herbalism, cooking, smelting, metalworking, and more.
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That’s what ate up my attention, happily, as the alpine landscape of Icarus’ first biome was so lovely I was ready to move in and after figuring out some quirks the building system was robust enough to make me really delight in crafting a home.
Hall was laser-focused on another reason to build a cabin, however: Storms. The surface of Icarus isn’t just generally inhospitable to human life, but is wracked by persistent extreme weather events. The first one that hit really jarred me, knocking holes in our small shelter and requiring us to scramble to keep it repaired and standing. I dealt with a lot more storms while playing Icarus, but they never quite got routine. There was always something new, like once when a pack of wolves decided to break into my cabin as lightning struck outside, or when one hit while I was mid-renovation and I scrambled to cover the holes in the roof.
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I didn’t see it happen, but Hall told me that lightning can strike wildfires. I set one off myself using flaming arrows and watched it burn the trees on a nearby island to the ground.
Knowing that your equipment and structures were at the whim of violent nature was scary, and it added to the sense of everything I was doing being temporary. High winds and heavy storms knocked holes in my cabins regularly. I eventually gave up on keeping the fishing pier I’d made repaired. The drop we were in was only two days: Nothing needed to be very permanent. We were here to explore and prospect for valuables, not to settle. I felt torn, though, because I was enjoying building so much—but anywhere else I went would need a shelter as well.
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Nonetheless, I knew I wouldn’t survive long without good equipment and the ability to carry water with me. Getting to the point where I could make metal tools didn’t take too much work, which is something I appreciated and that Hall was clear on the design philosophy of. He didn’t figure that players should spend too much time on the initial tech stages because the game was ultimately about setting up a base to prospect for rare minerals. These early levels—I made it up past level 20 in the time I had—were about learning the survival systems and the purpose of different survival methods, not the point of the whole game.
I didn’t just need shelter and protection from storms, but from wildlife. Packs of wolves roamed the mountains, hunting the same deer I was hunting, and would come near my settlement fairly often. After I had an iron spear, a longbow, and a metal canteen—my leather waterskin was a bit leaky—I felt safe further from home. Setting off deeper into the mountains I spotted a bear from a distance and managed to take it out with a stealthy arrow shot to the face.
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The second time I wasn’t so lucky. I’d recently set off from my cabin to another location I’d marked as suitable for building, near the pass into a higher tundra biome and about halfway to the lower, sprawling desert lands. As I picked berries I heard a sort of roaring noise—and then there was a bear, right in my face, and then I was dead. I could have revived with the help of another player, but instead I spawned back near my initial drop pod.
I eventually evaded the bears and wolves long enough to find a fairly safe new build location, quickly setting up a new cabin and then spending the next day stocking it with food and necessities—a new crafting bench, for example, so I could repair my metal gear.
From there, wearing highly insulated new fur armor, I headed up into the cold mountains. Up there, I’d have to melt ice for drinking water and wood to burn for cooking was scarce. Further, flat surfaces accumulated snow, and a house without a peaked roof could collapse under the weight.
None of that mattered, really: Half a day’s trek into the high arctic I saw a polar bear. Naturally, I had to fight the polar bear—one arrow wasn’t enough, even from stealth, even to the head, but I managed to take it down at the last second with a spear thrust. I was setting about getting my knife to skin it when a pack of wolves showed up. I started retreating, but then another bear showed up very angry that I’d killed its friend. Back to the drop pod it was.
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Exploring further, I started to see the kinds of irregularities that Hall had hinted at. The exotic matter materials present on Icarus caused the terraforming to fail, and it’s those exotics that you’re here to get—but those exotics have had effects on the earth life transplanted here. After a long trek out of the mountains, which took me about 45 minutes, I descended into a series of low canyons with savannah grasses, scrubby bushes, and low palm trees clustered around tiny pools of water.
Towering elephants were a surprise to me, roaming in small groups of two or three and utterly unconcerned with a tiny person. Another surprise was a lioness that tried to sneak up on me, but took a good spear to the head and went down. All of this was pretty regular until I looked closer: The odd-looking red goats that lived there didn’t quite correspond to any specific earth life. There were also small, scurrying things between lizard and rabbit—definitely native life rather than an Earth import. Trekking further through the desert, another half hour, I saw more trees and evergreen forests. As I approached, I saw something move, like one of the wolves I’d seen before, but it seemed bigger. Afraid to lose what I’d found on my journey so far I turned back into the desert and set about finding materials for a shelter. That wasn’t to be: While mining rocks on a cliffside I was ambushed by a pair of lions and killed.
At that point I realized I’d lost track of the time. Four minutes left in the drop. There was no hope of making it back to the drop pod, and my character was doomed to be lost forever. From my experience, Icarus will be a game for explorers and builders, intrepid crews of cooperative PvE pioneers. I’m excited to see what’s in store when it launches on August 11th.
