Solarpunk Review - Not a Fan

Seren
6 days ago
10 min read

Survival games are known to be a weird mix of peacefulness and pressure and can often be seen as an embodiment of romanticism in the same way life sims are. You are detached from the rat race that is life and from anything resembling the society that seeks to constrain you. Instead, you are in pursuit of being one with nature. Yes, they can also be characterized by stress, but there is always an inherent tranquility in games like Minecraft. They are often idyllic and an escape, to say the least, and I found this peacefulness turned up to the max in Solarpunk. In this game, created by the two brains behind Cyberwave, you are left to make sense of your surroundings and build a new life for yourself. You become completely self-sustainable instead of having to rely on making a living and paying for goods that are often overpriced just to get by. In this game, it’s just you and the open land, and it seemingly makes for a nice adventure, albeit one that feels uninspired and often hypocritical in its idyllic scenery.

Solarpunk is your run-of-the-mill survival game with not a lot that makes it stand out from the swathes of other titles that spew out every month. You wake up on a floating island with nothing to your name, except for a watermelon smoothie and a piece of toast. Okay, sure. The game is mostly directionless with a few stages of tutorial to help you get started before you are let loose to establish your own roots. It’s then up to you to build everything from the ground up, like a farm, your house, and an arrangement of machinery that will steadily make your life easier. It’s all solid stuff, albeit nothing that had me frothing at the mouth at any time.

Solarpunk’s gameplay is extremely familiar to those who have played at least one survival sim but lacks a lot of aspects that make the world feel that bit busier. There isn’t any combat to add any kind of pressure or stakes, there’s no story or characters to interact with, so it’s just me, myself, and I. Players who are looking for a complete rest from anything stressful will feel right at home here, and I wouldn’t necessarily say the absence of these aspects is a bad thing, just something to note. The survival aspect shows itself by requiring the player to keep an eye on their hunger, health, and thirst meter, which can be easily replenished with berries or rainwater that you have collected. You can only lose health if you catapult yourself off a cliff or your other two meters are depleted, so don’t do that.

The focal point of Solarpunk’s gameplay is crafting and gathering materials, which ultimately makes foraging easier. You’ll start off with a basic set of tools, such as a hoe and a pickaxe, and use a crafting table to make handy contraptions such as a rain collector to gather drinkable water or a beehive to create beeswax. And then there’s the research table. Here, you’ll use gathered resources to unlock collections of items like bricks and even leaves. This eventually leads up to earning basic animal products. These two systems pair well together, with the early game feeling quite satisfying to play. I hopped between exploring the island to chop down trees and mine rocks, back to managing farms in order to contain cotton and wheat with ease. The micro-managing involved in playing Solarpunk can feel addicting, but that said, there are many lulls in the flow of gameplay. For one, you have to wait a set number of in-game days so that certain items can spawn, like crops or smelting ore. This was fine at first, but once I hit the 5-hour mark, tedium began setting in. I found myself twiddling my thumbs in boredom as I hung around waiting for an item to be ready many times throughout this review.

Typically speaking, the natural progression of survival games is to automate systems that take up a bit too much of your time as you get later into the game. Think of how you can set up an irrigation system for a farm to help water a larger radius of your field, as one example. In Solarpunk, creating intricate systems that feature wires and generators that power the farm is a big part of the appeal. To help in this process, you’ll eventually meet a delightful little robot who you can trade resources to for energy-powered machines.

Devices start out relatively simple; for example, you’ll craft an energy generator, add fuel, hook it up with cables to a machine, and watch the process carry on without the need to manually mine for copper. The systems eventually progress to being so self-sufficient that you don’t have to provide any input whatsoever.

As another example, setting up solar panels to produce constant energy to power my sprinklers meant I could pass by and collect crops whenever I needed them. To add even more customization, you can build batteries that store excess energy and even machines that detect when it’s raining so your sprinklers won’t be sprinkling away and wasting energy when they don’t need to be. The more I built, the more satisfying these systems felt. It’s also crucial to mention that all of this is done using pure renewable energy like the aforementioned solar panels. It was nice to know that I wasn’t completely destroying the landscape at all times in order to survive. However, this is also where Solarpunk rubbed me the wrong way in how it ironically presents its themes.

Solarpunk is defined as “a vision of a sustainable, egalitarian future where humanity lives in harmony with nature” through the use of technology. However, the game’s idea of harmony feels a bit one-sided. It’s fair to say that most players drawn to Solarpunk are looking for an eco-friendly experience that aligns with their beliefs. Yes, you can replant trees, but plants like berry bushes or watermelon patches are destroyed the moment you harvest them. You could argue that you’re effectively industrializing a space that was already a beautiful haven of nature. If the world had started as more of a wasteland, the progression might have felt more rewarding and more in line with what Solarpunk represents. Ultimately, it’s up to the player whether they can look past this irony.

Solarpunk also lets you raise animals, even if they are very suddenly taken from their homes. This game features hours upon hours of gameplay, and despite my best efforts, I didn’t get far enough to see the pigs and cows that were hinted at, but I did get to manage a few chickens. After researching basic animal products at your research table, you will be able to buy a coop and feeding troughs to help keep your animals happy and healthy. Once you bribe an animal with their favorite food so that they follow you to the pasture, they will typically stick around until there’s no food to eat. Thankfully, this problem is easily solved by fencing them in.

Once the animal's stats, such as hunger and happiness, are high enough, they will then produce items like eggs. This system is decent but lacks any of the love and relationship building I adore in other games of the genre. Sure, you can name your friends, though the way they are portrayed as wooden, lifeless dolls is a bit off-putting. I can’t even pet them, so I guess they are just there to give me what I need to survive, and that’s that.

Once you have established a rhythm on the initial floating island, you’ll soon be able to venture further afield using an airship that you build from the remnants of an old one that you found high up on the cliffs. Controlling the airship is a quick learn and didn’t feel quite as clunky as I expected it to. My only issues with it were how buggy docking could be on islands without a docking station, but we will talk about that in my review of the game’s bugs.

The game requires you to upgrade your airship so you can fly out even further, which is where the repetition of finding new resources to build better homes really starts to hit. Each wave of islands brings in a new ore type and eventually even a new farm animal. Initially, it is exciting to discover unexplored terrain, but unfortunately, this will become Solarpunk’s largest flaw.

Like I said, each floating island has a new range of resources to gather, but that’s about it. This means that once you’ve pillaged an area, you’ll never have any need to return. The only exceptions are that you’ll have to trawl back to get that island’s specific ore, but that’s just annoying. I didn’t mind venturing a few seconds away to grab some copper, but making lengthy journeys over and over again becomes a nightmare. After 10 hours had gone by in Solarpunk, I was close to throwing in the towel.

Having these islands be so bare-bones is a major disappointment and pretty much ruined exploration for me. I would sprint across an island, scoop everything up, and that’s all. I didn’t want to establish new settlements because there was no need to do so. I think this problem could have easily been alleviated through giving players meaningful reasons to return to previously visited areas. Perhaps more shop vendors that held unique items? Something like that. In this regard, Solarpunk simply feels uninspired.

Easily the most realized gameplay system in Solarpunk is the building of houses and other buildings your imagination conjures up. Even though I don’t know anything about roofing in real life and likely never will, I was constantly impressed with the game's beautiful building architecture. Building itself is simple and handily streamlined so you can easily construct with a range of half walls, different styles, and even a glass set that allows for beautifully made greenhouses or conservatories. It’s all stunning, with just a few minor annoyances, like the foundation levels. With how bumpy the landscape of Solarpunk is, you will need to ensure the foundation is high enough to accommodate dips and bumps. This feels and looks a bit janky, but is all highly customizable, so I could see plenty of players spending hours building mansions that hang from cliffs.

The furnishings you can place inside and out are also beautiful, with an array of plants, pictures, and rugs available to bring color and life to your wooden abode. I’m at my happiest when I’m building cozy spaces, so I was more than happy with my quaint living quarters.

As I touched on at the start of this review, Solarpunk does not have a story, so there is no story to talk about. You wake up on a floating island and off you go. It doesn’t even have any characters to interact with outside of your robot friend. This could either be incredibly boring, or it might be a dream come true depending on your personal preferences. For me, it meant I never got invested in the world of Solarpunk or its brick-ass chickens. Without any relationship building or interesting narrative beats, the game felt like it lacked substance. For that reason alone, I couldn’t see myself choosing this over other farming sims, as I tend to look for personality in my farming sims that surrounds the gameplay. They don’t even have to be scripted characters, just anyone would have made a difference here. Take Minecraft for example, it is just you in that open blocky world, but you come across settlements of villagers which is part of the excitement.

The music in Solarpunk fits its vibe well enough, but leans a bit generic, with not much that caught my eye, or should I say ear. The tunes are light and airy, breaking up the natural sounds of the wind and beyond. Like its sound and music, its visuals can also be a bit bland and safe. Don’t get me wrong, everything is nice to look at, but nothing really stands out, and some aspects of the game seemed to cut corners, like the aforementioned animals. I’m not asking for ultra-cuteness, but a bit of life in these living things would have been nice. The only eye-catching aesthetic I came across was in the small floating island where your robo pal resides, and the architecture of the buildings you could construct like the airship dock.

Performance in Solarpunk was a bit of a mixed bag. I didn’t find anything game-breaking but there were a few annoyances that I hope the developers are working on. The biggest bug I encountered was when I tried to dock my ship. To make landing easier, the game expects you to build a docking station. You press ‘E’ when you are near one and it automatically docks for you if you are going slow enough. Landing feels clunky as the game struggles to know when there is a flat surface below you. Sometimes it docks midair, and sometimes it neatly settles on the ground. However, twice in my playthrough when I docked my ship, the doors to let me off the ship wouldn’t open. I would then try to jump, and this would glitch me through the floor and plummet me to my death. Not annoying at all.

Luckily, if you die, your inventory is left in that same location so you can pick it up, but sometimes it would randomly spawn in different areas. If you find yourself stranded on one of the other islands because you glitched through the airship just before docking at your main island, then the unstuck feature can help you out and respawn you at your bed, Minecraft style. Other bugs were extremely minor like plots of land duplicating, and my robot chicken being stuck in a corner of an island. Nothing too crazy.

Lastly, the game will support multiplayer with friends which seems like it could be a decent time and will finally provide me with someone to talk to on these godforsaken isles!

Solarpunk is a substantial survival game that never pushes itself beyond the bare minimum. Yes, you can craft, build, and farm, and the micro-managing scratches a small itch, but these systems never left me feeling fulfilled in totality. Instead, they became a repetitive drone of tasks rather than leading to a satisfying adventure. Its complete lack of story and character also strips Solarpunk of an identity, something it desperately needs to stand out in an overcrowded genre. It leans into the renewable-energy, eco-friendly angle, but I’ve already seen games commit far more confidently to that concept, and at times Solarpunk feels like it doesn’t fully understand the very ideas it’s trying to promote. It often has a lovely aesthetic, and building can be fun, but after ten hours I don’t see myself continuing. That’s why I’m awarding Solarpunk the Table Lamp of Mediocrity.