The Tribe Must Survive is an interesting game about survival with some real-time strategy sprinkled around it to add some intensity and depth. Developer Walking Tree Games GmbH has put together a simple concept of taking a tribe of fear-driven humans and pitting them against harsh conditions in the wild, the threat of starvation and shock, and, most of all, the threat of the unknown which is aiming to kill them at any given moment. Your job as the player? Well, get them to survive and move on before a violent eclipse shows up to turn their fears into reality.
My time with this demo of the game has been largely spent trying to figure out exactly how far I need to go with it to progress. For the last week, I have been pressing and pushing the game, failing at it, then discovering new strategies to progress forward passed my failure inch by inch. It’s certainly a game that requires the utmost patience from the player, and one that doesn’t give you too many details to go on. At the same time, it’s a game that relies on you to make the right choice and find a way forward through discovery and exploration (and common sense).
So, build out that shelter, make room for wood and food gathering, and let’s explore exactly what The Tribe Must Survive is about.
Simple story, simple gameplay, difficult strategies
The story surrounding The Tribe Must Survive is about basic survival. You’re thrown into some weird stone age time where you must lead a tribe to success and survival. You are given simple tasks to prepare for the darkness that surrounds you and wants to ‘get’ you, and mystical destruction that is inevitable if you don’t progress quickly enough. Collecting wood, building shelters, and discovering new inventive ways to make do in the worst of times, is the crux of the story and gameplay. The story is enough to get the game going and not at all overbearing when it comes to gameplay. The story simply exists as a small primer to give you reason and motivation to push forward in the game.
Simplicity in motion and decision
Pushing forward in the game is also set up to be simple. You’re given simple ways to survive in the game through wood collecting, hunting, and building. You build woodsheds for your tribe to chop down and collect wood, then take that wood to build shelter and other ways to survive. As you progress in the game, you start gaining other abilities like farming, mining stone, and building a life for your tribe. It’s a wash, rinse, repeat sort of deal that comes with its own set of complications. At this point, though, The Tribe Must Survive is not too complicated with purpose and execution. It feels more like a real-time strategy game, as it is at its core level, more than anything else. Because of this, it is instantly wonderful, as collecting, building, and progressing are what make up any great RTS experience. Call me crazy, but seeing gradual progression in an RTS experience is what makes it wonderful.
Impending doom
Now, things get complicated when two main elements come into play. Firstly, the day/night rotation that exists in the game brings about some true survival obstacles. When the day turns to night, you must light up your village as quickly as you can, as you want to keep your tribe from building up fear of the darkness, and you want to keep the darkness away from the tribe. The latter of the bunch is filled with unseen beings that live within the darkness and those beings want to snatch your tribe members away. POOF! Gone forever. Never to be seen again. That’s intense.
To make the light issue more intense, if you don’t have enough light to keep your members comfortable, then they run the risk of becoming overwhelmed with fear and could go into shock, which means they won’t help the tribe prepare for the second reason for survival (it’s coming). At this point in the game, you must use a methodically thought-through strategy to help balance out what material you gather, how much you use, and how far you take your material. This becomes a necessary problem to solve on the fly. As you set up fires to keep the light going during the night, you burn through wood, so you must balance the amount of wood you gather with how much you use to keep your peeps safe, while also trying to retain the largest number of wood possible through the night. You don’t want to constantly play catch-up with your supplies or you won’t get far in the game. At some point in this process, you will find a good balance but at what point you finally get to that balance is important because you must worry about the second issue – an impending eclipse that completely kills the daylight for days.
The end is nigh…unless you prepare well
You would think that having an abundance of wood would keep an eclipse at bay because of the fires you could light. You would think that, and you would be wrong. Depending on the number of tribe members you have, and the most I had during this preview playthrough was 24 at a time, means you must keep a certain number of fires going to avoid freaking them out. Too many fires mean you’re taking gobs and gobs of wood away from your supply. Not enough fires could equal tribe members not helping to prepare for the impending eclipse. When the eclipse happens, it will bring a large amount of time in the darkness to the tribe and block everything outside of the light. If you have too many members, and too much wood burning, then your tribe may not outlast the eclipse, which means you’re probably going to be wiped out completely. It’s nutso how the littlest trip-up can cause a catastrophic ending to the tribe you have cultivated into a society. Now, the good part of this intensity and strategic juggling is that there is so much going on in this game at once that it’s addictive as it is incredibly difficult, which makes for a fun challenge.
Anyway, there are a few ways around the eclipse — one that I’m assuming, and the other I’m just confidently assuming. The first way is to build up a large stock of wood with the least number of members. Is that feasible? It feels like it could be, but I haven’t done it yet. I’ve been close but playing for a few hours at a time, nearly two hours a match, hasn’t produced a successful run with this method. I’m still certain that it’s doable but I have no proof to say it is.
The other way to get around the eclipse is simply changing your location to another area. And there are a lot of areas to unlock in the game. I haven’t been to any of them, but I can see them when I zoom out on the map. Unlocking a new area sounds simple, but it’s not. You must build your village out to its borders, while also retaining a good amount of influence with your tribe (something that is measured by your actions and branching decision-making during forked moments in the story road, another part of the game) while saving up food and wood for the journey. I’m confident this is a solution because the game gives hints there is an Act II to the gameplay it says ‘Act II’ on some of the building elements of the game, but no hints on how to get there. I’m assuming escaping from one land for another is the transition, and thus, the solution to escaping and building up to Act II in the game and progressing. I’m confident of this but have never successfully made it through during my preview playthrough.
Exploration and discovery are encouraged
There’s so much to this game, so much to explore and discover, and I’m happy that the developers didn’t give you much to go on to progress. Most of the adventure in The Tribe Must Survive is driven by assumptions from the player, and honestly, that works well for this type of game. There are few games out there that give the player complete control to discover, develop, and find their way through gameplay. Most developers simply don’t have that much trust in their gamers. This game seems different, and the developers simply say, ‘Go for it, and see what you can do’. I’m not sure I have played a game that allows for this much freedom, at least not in the last 20 years. Can it get frustrating? Oh, sure, but finding your way during a game can be addictive and it continually welcomes the player back with open arms to try again. It’s strangely fun gameplay and The Tribe Must Survive is a game that I will be revisiting once I free some time to do so.
Anyway, this is the game I’ve been playing for more than a week on and off, and The Tribe Must Survive is a game to keep an eye on as it slowly moves through early access.
On that note, let’s wrap this preview up.
Build you up to break you down
The Tribe Must Survive from developer Walking Tree Games GmbH is a strangely addictive game that has more to offer than expected. It’s simple, challenging, and thick asking the player to figure out what the gameplay is trying to do. The fact that it doesn’t hold the player’s hand is what makes it most intriguing and attractive.
We will keep an eye on this as it continues to develop. Until then, stay tuned.
