Even in the best of times, moving to a new town isn’t easy. Not knowing anyone, the best stuff hidden away, the new place not yet anything like a home, and everything being different is hard enough, but take out concepts like “town” or even basic civilization and it becomes that much worse. A lone traveler ending up deep underground with nothing but the cave’s glow for guidance seems like they’d be in an even worse situation than normal, but seeing as they’re a crafty sort what isn’t there can be built. Even if “what isn’t there” is just about everything.
Alone In the Dark
Core Keeperis an all-purpose base-builder survival adventure, pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a 2D pixel-art overhead take on the genre aside from being in a massive, sprawling network of caves. Starting off with a user-created character, you’re dropped into the dark, gloomy core of the caverns without a single idea of where to go. It’s dark enough, in fact, that there’s no way to navigate beyond the glow of the giant egg-monument you landed in front of, but beating on the branches entangling it gives the first resource in the game. With wood in the inventory it can be hand-crafted into torches and the first rough work bench, and from thereCore Keeperslowly starts growing and doesn’t let up.
Enshrouded Welcomes Three Million Players to Embervale, Has Room for Plenty More
Embervale is a terrible place to be, which hasn’t stopped three million players from carving out homesteads in Enshrouded’s landscape.
While the central statue area is enclosed, the walls are desctructible after a few good hits. Granted, this would be easier with better tools, and it’s possible you might have some available depending on the class chosen during the character creator. The classes are more for starting out, rather than any long-term benefits, and in Normal mode the no-skill-levels/no-equipment Nomad isn’t noticeably less effective than any of the other options. Harvest wood, make torches, build work bench, follow the gleam in the walls to get copper ore, upgrade the workbench to a fancier low-level metal one and the natural flow of doing the obviously-needed tasks will get things properly started before the first low-level slimes and mushroom-creatures appear. It’s a gentle start to the adventure, which is for the best seeing as there’s no direction to speak of.
One of the big questions at the start of any base-builder is where the best place to set up shop will be, and inCore Keeperthere’s really no way to know this other than to explore. The dark caverns aren’t particularly inviting and the mini- and full-sized maps don’t show anything other than what you’ve seen, so the only options are to either pick a direction and walk, digging through the earth when it gets in the way, or spiral out from the center. Regular caves are kind of gloomy while the mushroom biomes are heavy on the monsters, but eventually open meadows show up, lightly illuminated by shafts of light poking through from above and the glimmer of glow bugs. A good place will be obvious once found, but like a lot ofCore Keeperthere’s no guidepost towards the destination. You’ll need to figure out the progression while playing.
A Slow Burn to a Strong Payoff
What this means is that, for the first part of the game at least, progression doesn’t tend to feel like progress. Upgrades come at a good pace, with copper giving way to tin and iron, various types of earth blocks letting you control the base’s biome with a bit of digging and replacing of the ground, and a dizzying array of workbenches becoming available to construct more elaborate tools and equipment, but it’s an aimless kind of progress. It’s crafting and building for the sake of crafting and building, just to see what opens up next. Thankfully the adventuring aspect picks up the slack, and while it’s no more directed than the crafting goals, at least it’s always fun to beat on monsters.
While you can choose a character class at the start or forgo one entirely, progression is based on what you do rather than what you are. Each of the basic skills has its own mini skill tree and you get better by doing, whether that be melee or ranged combat, different types of magic, fishing, gardening or even simply running. One of the better tools in the inventory screen is the character equipment, which has three loadouts to choose from at any given time.
It’s possible to get through the game only using one, but head, torso and leg armor can all boost different skills, as can a number of accessories, so there’s plenty of room for min-maxing depending on whether you want to fill things with arrows, hang back while summoned creatures do the bulk of the fighting, or toss fireballs everywhere. Granted, a quick change in strategy requires a moment of safety, seeing as dropping to inventory to change the loadout doesn’t pause, but running away is almost always an option. Even if you go generalist, with one loadout for all situations, the variety of effective ways to attack means that although the combat is straightforward there are always enough options to stop it from getting overly repetitive.
While the combat carries the earlier parts ofCore Keeper, beating the third boss opens up a new set of areas and their resources that finally kicks the base-building into overdrive. Up to that point a house could be little more than a big room with a bed, some crafting stations and a chest or two to hold the spoils of adventuring, and while you could get fancy if you wanted, there didn’t feel like much of a reason to. The ore in the new areas allows crafting a number of devices, from mining automation to gardening aids, and suddenly it’s worth ripping things out and planning them out properly. Livestock like the game’s version of cows, goats and seagull-chickens (technically they’re called dodos) need a safe place to live, vegetables farms are much easier to maintain, there are enough different crafting stations that it makes sense to divide the house up into different rooms for different tasks, etc. The slow scaling up reaches a tipping point, and suddenly it’s easy to lose as much time building, crafting, bug-catching and fishing as it is mining and fighting in the caves away from home.
Review: Phantom Spark
Phantom Spark’s controls and short, easily memorizable courses are a welcoming on-ramp for a beast of a racer.
Core Keepertakes a bit to find its footing, but once it takes off the different elements come together to create an adventure where there’s never a shortage of different things to do even if no one system is overly complicated, with a good example being cooking. Vegetables and fish are more effective cooked, and the cooking pot can hold two things at once. Each combination makes its own dish, and there are surprisingly large number of ingredients so a huge number of dishes to discover. Each ingredient has a specific effect, though, so while the number of things you can make may be a little overwhelming it’s not hard to figure out that if you combine the glow of a flower with the toughness of the carrots you’ll get a dish that gives a bonus to illumination and defense. Even so,Core Keepermanages to have enough systems working together that the simplicity of them never becomes a problem.
Closing Comments:
Core Keeper is a strong survival game that can easily chew through the hours, providing a great balance between adventure and homesteading. There’s a sense that no idea was left out, whether that be a constant pet companion or minecart rail lines, and while these may not get fully fleshed out, this is a rare occasion where quantity manages to make up for depth. The pet levels up and sometimes enemies drop treats that give it a nice experience boost, and that’s all it needs to do. Minecart goes on tracks, riding it beats walking and maybe it doesn’t need a complicated system of switches and sidings to get the job done. The underground world ofCore Keeperstretches on for functionally forever, filled with chasms, monsters, resources beyond measure and even an underground sea. There’s a huge amount of ways to play with it all and sometimes that’s more than enough.
Core Keeper
Version Reviewed: PC
Trapped in a cave with no way out, the only real option is to convert the monster-infested depths into a comfy home. Build a house, garden, fish, scavenge, and mine to get better tools, and beat on monsters to maybe eventually escape the sprawling subterranean map.
