Way back in the early part of 2024, I played through The Tribe Must Survive while it was in early access. What I found was an addictive game that pressed me with its strategy to keep a group of people alive, develop their world while catering to their needs, and at the same time force me to get better through the emotional fragility of its characters. It was one helluva EA playthrough.
Now, it’s out of early access and it has come a long way with bits and pieces to keep you interested in what can be grueling gameplay. The game is still the same at its core, and it pushes you hard inside a real-time strategy wrapper, forcing you to collect/build while finding some sort of balance to use resources to simply survive.
Light some torches, keep the darkness out of the light, and let’s get this review going.
The story still satisfies even with its simplicity
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. While there aren’t too many complicated details sprinkled into the experience to definitively define what the hell is going on, the story is enough to get the game going and strike enough interest to keep the attention of the player.
What you do get with the story in The Tribe Must Survive is straightforward. Enemies are unseen but lurking, and their mere presence sets the tone and pressure for the player wanting/needing to get their people through the wild. It echoes that old Alfred Hitchcock saying, where the worst things to fear are the things you don’t see. This game lives on that Hitchcock mantra and uses it as a device to push the story into a horror-filed pressure cooker where anything could get you at any time. That fear pushes the player to adapt and imagine a terrible fate that can only be avoided by getting the tribe you control into a more survivable situation.
Again, it’s a simple story structure that depends on the player to fill in the blanks more than the game. I can dig that, especially because it works very well in creating urgency during the gameplay and assuming a good chunk of the story. There are lots of moments where the darkness in the game is just overwhelming and you fear for the villagers’ lives, which connects you to the story and the struggle. You don’t need an actual three-act narrative, though you do get some branching narratives hopping along during gameplay, to drive this, you just need a good reason, and the reason is what makes this story so good.
I love this type of story. It works well, and it’s memorable.
Simple gameplay that makes replayability easy
Pushing forward in the game is also set up to be simple. You’re given simple ways to survive by collecting wood to use for building, hunting for eating, and plans to build structures that progress your tribe and make it easier for them to survive (and explore – the lands are huge). Those structures could be storage woodsheds for your tribe to store wood, and 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, but it is a progressive build upwards toward safety that keeps the game interesting. 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. Call me crazy, but seeing gradual progression in an RTS experience is what makes it that genre a wonderful and addictive type of gameplay to experience.
To add further credence to that RTS notion, as you build up and out your tribe, your tribe becomes bigger and bigger. You’ll gain more tribe, add more people, and add more folks who can gather more resources. While that might give you the giggles and make you think that everything is sunshiny with that success, creating a delusion that you’re going to be a mogul and set fire to the story, the game is quite aware that it has to balance out the progression.
The more tribe that you gain, the more resources are needed to keep it going. It’s a catch-22 of sorts, where you’ll have a good amount of success when you catch on, but you’re putting more pressure on yourself to survive. Much like real life, the more you gain, the more is needed from your efforts. It certainly meets the criteria for the phrase, “You played yourself, player”.
This formula that Walking Tree Games built within The Tribe Must Survive works well and it certainly keeps you engaged and interested, if not only to see your tribe through hard times. And those times can get hard, especially when death is knocking at your door at all hours.
Those hard times
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, as it can snatch tribe members if they wander too far into it. It’s terrifying to imagine what goes on in the dark parts, as it happens so fast. You can lose a game quickly by not lighting enough torches to keep the light wide and consistent. If you don’t have enough light, fear snatches members of the tribe and they stop working. Without work, the resources start to fail, and the delicate balance that you have to respect in The Tribe Must Survive rears its ugly head.
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 tribe safe, while also trying to retain the largest number of wood possible through the night to prepare for the next 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. Getting that sweet spot where you can plan for the next expansion or tribe exploration, is vital for surviving the night and an impending eclipse while stretching out the game time.
I found this core gameplay to be the main reason why I enjoyed the experience so much, as I love a good head-scratcher. But also at times, I found the entire balance problem frustrating.
The game is actively trying to one-up your efforts and keep up with your progression. If you have tons of wood, then the game provides you with more tribe, which means you’re burning more wood. The cycle of collecting and using the wood smartly becomes bigger and more complicated. It’s not an impossible juggling act to figure out, and the game has some FromSoftware-esque charm to the strategic complication it creates, but it does feel overwhelming at times. It’s a ‘one step forward, two steps backward’ situation at times.
Exploration present but pressured
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. I know some gamers enjoy being told exactly what the hell is going on, but the entire shroud of mystery and lack of details make you want to explore and find out more. 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 gameplay. There are few games out there that give the player complete control to discover, develop, and find their way through gameplay without drowning them too much in detail. This is one of those games. Depending on what type of gamer you are, you may love or hate that, but it’s how The Tribe Must Survive works.
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 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 with its challenge and it continually welcomes the player back with open arms to try again. This is what embodies the very gameplay of The Tribe Must Survive and it helps forgive its lack of details and overcome its pressure-cooker difficulty. And, most importantly, it pushes the player to come back for more. I like a game that does that. Well, a game not called Dark Souls.
New pieces for the finished release
Back in January, the adventure portion of the game without its bells and whistles was available in early access. It certainly felt unfinished but also it gave hope there was more to come. And the good devs at Walking Tree did add some elements to give players choices and help them out once in a while.
The first thing I noticed is that the game allows you to play the eclipse-driven pressure cooker that came out for EA, and it allows you to play the game without that. The latter has you collecting and surviving but not feeling like the end is nigh. There is less rush to this new version and while there is still pressure to survive, you’re just not pressured with the thought that your entire world is going to end quickly. It was a wise move to include the more laid-back version of the game so that players could just relax and play a thoughtless RTS experience.
The other thing that I noticed is that you can gain XP at the end of each round, maybe it was in EA and I don’t remember that, but it felt new, and if you die and play again the game offers up some primers to get you going (more resources at the beginning, more structures that are ready, etc.). These are simple moves to create more engagement with the game and keep the player interested in playing it again. These are smart moves and good additions to an already solid experience.
Anyway, enough of my rambling, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
The Tribe Must Survive from developer Walking Tree Games GmbH is a fun survival game that is difficult as it is addictive.
