It's odd to say that I loved the tutorial for the early access colony survival game Stranded: Alien Dawn (opens in new tab)? Like, I enjoyed the tutorial so much that I could actually play it again from start to finish before starting a proper game? No joke. It's that good.
In Stranded, you manage a small group of colonists who have crash-landed on an alien planet. Each has a collection of skills and personality traits, and your job is to guide them from gathering basic supplies to researching new technologies to building a base and defending it from giant alien bugs. And of course, you’ll need to make sure everyone gets along and manage their mental health along with their physical health. Think RimWorld, but in a game that feels more like Rust.
The tutorial is excellent (and honestly, I think a great move would be to release it as a free demo so everyone can try it out), walking you through the first steps of creating a shelter, basic gathering and storage, and building your first workbenches. After you've completed a few initial tasks, it progresses through the lives of your colonists, teaching you how to manage them in combat and keep them happy and healthy, and gives you a look at overseeing a more technologically advanced base with electronic and automated defenses.
The tutorial took about 90 minutes to complete, and along the way I got a good look at the depth of the management system. You can set daily schedules for each colonist, assign numbered priorities to each of their tasks, or even dictate specifically what they do on an hourly basis, including breaks for rest and entertainment. It’s like Asana: The Videogame. You can also “staff” them, which gives you full control over what they do, especially useful when fighting alien bugs or if there’s a specific task you want to get done right away.
And it’s not just the human colonists you can micromanage. As they gather or generate resources and food, you can even dictate which items can be placed on which shelves in their storage cabinets. If you don’t trust those dummies not to store raw ingredients and cooked meals out in the open, you can tell them specifically what goes in the fridge and what stays on the shelf, and tell them specifically what they can eat and what’s off-limits. It’s a micromanager’s dream come true.
You really don't to need to monitor and govern absolutely everything they do—settlers have their own priorities that they’ll follow—but the point is, you can. I don’t think I’ll be keeping an eye on them as much as the game allows, but it’s nice to know the option is there. I’ve played plenty of management games where one of my citizens would wander off and do something stupid, and I like that in Stranded I can forbid that behavior. Along with skills for activities like farming, building, and crafting, settlers can also have interest levels for different tasks, meaning a task can be something they enjoy doing rather than something they just agonize over.
The tutorial also jumps from survivors living in a rudimentary shelter to building a proper home with a foundation, walls, separate rooms, and all the bells and whistles that come with modern life: electricity from turbines and solar panels, lighting and comfort, air conditioning and climate control, and even a battery level sensor that tells a diesel generator to kick in when the batteries run dry to prevent power loss. Natural base defenses like automatic turrets and motion sensors also work off the grid, and setting up different circuits for each system on the grid gives you complete control over your base’s power.
Stranded: Alien Dawn has just been released on Early Access on Steam. It's developed by Haemimont Games, makers of the Tropico and Surviving Mars series, and has a great pedigree for management. I'm planning on spending my weekend playing it – once I get through the tutorial again, just for fun.
