There are a number of cozy farming and crafting titles in today’s video gaming market: 2016’s Stardew Valley and 2020’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons are still a couple of the most popular. But now, small indie game maker Cyberwave has put its own twist on the concept with Solarpunk.
This new entry feels a lot like what’s come before. But Solarpunk leans into the idea of creating an eco-friendly, green and technologically advanced utopia with renewable energy, floating islands and cute little airships.
This first-person adventure doesn’t give you a lot of handholding early on. It lets you lightly customize an avatar then plops you down on a small sky-island that’s littered with natural resources, such as trees, berry bushes, some mineral-rich rocks and a pond. Then the game bids you to have at it.
If you choose to walk through a tutorial, you’ll receive a small task list that’ll get you headed in the right direction—along with a weathered tool and a few sustenance items. Oh, and the game also offers you a choice of Standard play or “Soft” play for survival-farming newbies. That Soft choice lightens up on your personal “thirst” and “hunger” demands so you can more readily focus on your resource-gathering, house-building and farm-planting duties.
If you gather the right materials, you can quickly craft the beginning tools you’ll need, such as a pickaxe, a hoe and a tree-chopping axe. And with a bit of exploration, you’ll locate the remains of a crashed airship that only requires a few items to repair. With that restored ship you can begin to putter over to nearby sky-islands to find new resources and make new discoveries.
Your initial goals include: raising usable and tradable crops like berries, cotton and melons; building protection from the elements; and figuring out how to piece together essential items, such as a crafting table and a mineral-smelting furnace.
As mentioned, Solarpunk wants you to be as eco-friendly as possible. So the game limits its immediately available resources, requiring you to replant trees and bushes you’ve chopped down. Solarpunk also offers access to renewable-energy devices, such as solar panels and wind turbines, that help power and automate your farm irrigation and such. Recipes for these techy blessings can be acquired from a nearby robotic trader.
From there, it’s all about exploration, development, building, replenishing and … repeating. There are no threats to navigate or mysteries to solve in this cozy farming and crafting title.
Solarpunk can easily be played as a single-player, offline game. But it does offer shared multiplayer and co-op play with up to three other friends.
Solarpunk is all about low-stress discovery and building in an environmentally friendly manner. You can dial the survival demands down a bit while getting the hang of things. And the world around you is lovely, lush and generally friendly.
There are no threats from predators to worry about here. But you and your airship can get struck by lightning during stormy weather, damaging your airship and even crashing. (If you crash or fall off the edge of an island, you’re returned to your home base.) And, depending on the difficulty setting, players can potentially die of starvation or thirst.
It’s also possible for younger players to get turned around while navigating their airship, potentially losing track of their home island.
Solarpunk is a kid-friendly farming and crafting title that takes a little thought to navigate at times. But this low-stress survival game lets family and friends explore, build and turn the soil without worrying about splashing mess.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
