Solarpunk review – cosy and sustainable survival

A new cosy survival game takes an ecologically friendly approach to the genre, with a slow-paced open world adventure that proves surprisingly compelling.

It’s easy to be seduced by the big budget, highly polished, celebrity voice-acted world of triple-A games. Like a blockbuster Hollywood movie, you always know what you’re getting. There might not be too many surprises, but like buying a coffee at Starbucks or eating a burger at McDonald’s, there’s a consistency of product that means you’re rarely completely disappointed. However, there are times when that sterile, shareholder-pleasing predictability starts to feel a bit dull.

Indie games arrive with a bit more unvarnished humanity about them, letting you experience a small team’s passion project, rather than something designed by committees and focus groups. Solarpunk is exactly that sort of game, its voiceover and story free open world survival taking place on a series of discrete floating islands in the sky. At the beginning of the game, you’re trapped on just one of them.

Picking up stray sticks and stones from the ground, you find you can craft simple tools that let you chop down trees and break up rocks. Before long you’ll have made yourself a crafting table and acquired a survival guide, one of the game’s few examples of hand-holding. Once you’ve worked your way through its initial set of simple quests, you’re on your own, figuring out what to do next in order to live and thrive in the game’s idiosyncratic sky archipelago.

The first tip you’re given is a good one, which is to grow raspberries. They’re a safe bet because raspberry bushes are commonplace, meaning you’ll always have plenty of seeds to plant, and when you eat their fruit, they also take the edge off your thirst, doing some of the job your rainwater collectors would normally be responsible for and helping with survival.

Once immediate needs have been taken care of, you can begin your long journey along the game’s tech tree. As the title suggests, that’s never going to take you along the same route as the wonderful Satisfactory, whose untouched garden of Eden you gradually machine into a vast oil and enriched uranium producing industrial complex. Instead, you work with the land, your energy production initially coming from burning wood from trees you chop down, planting saplings to replace them so you don’t accidentally deforest your island.

The first significant non-organic piece of technology you acquire is from the crashed remains of an airship. Once discovered and looted, and with the addition of a few bits and pieces made in your freshly crafted furnace, you’ll have your own functioning airship, letting you access nearby islands, one of which houses a robotic trader, whose shop you can visit for further tasks that help give some shape to your progress.

Actually flying the airship is perfectly in keeping with Solarpunk’s pacing and mood. It takes a few minutes to pilot your way between the game’s floating islands, and when you arrive at your destination, you need to be carefully not to crash, either when docking at airship stations or landing in the wilderness. It demands due care and attention, and a slower pace than most video games.

The same goes for most of its developments, which also occur at an organic tempo. As you outgrow the need to use a pickaxe to break rocks and mine minerals, you’ll replace it with a solar powered drill. That works without your input, but only during the day, making for a stately extraction process, its freshly mined ore collected in a series of leisurely airship excursions. The day/night cycle is punctuated by occasional rain and thunderstorms, which provide life giving water but can also damage uncovered crops.

As you slowly expand, upgrading your airship to reach further flung islands, you gain access to new materials, animals, and crops to add to your farm. Your research also adds potential for base building. At the start of the game it’s enough to construct a wooden foundation, some walls and a roof, giving you somewhere to place your bed. Soon enough you’ll be able to add windows, decorations, extra storeys, and more ambitious enhancements.

It may not be as involved and complex as Minecraft, but there’s still a deceptively large amount to do as you craft, evolve and explore, adding new ingredients and researching fresh technologies as you extend your reach. It’s a tried and tested approach, which has also worked for Subnautica and a range of others, but Solarpunk adds its own likeable atmosphere and personality.

Unlike Outbound, whose somewhat simplistic crafting and refusal to provide a plot, left it bereft of motivation – your camper van meanderings feeling oddly pointless – Solarpunk’s drive comes from base building, and its tech tree, your steadily increasing web of manufacturing dependencies nudging you in the direction of modest new breakthroughs to sustain your sky pioneering. You can also play in co-op with friends, which adds some extra momentum to resource gathering and construction projects.

There are occasional bugs that see you fall through its landscapes into the endless void beneath, and it lacks the pressures of Subnautica’s regular drownings, or the sarcastic entreaties of an AI companion, but actually eschewing what are now becoming industry standards for open world survival games comes with its own sense of freedom. Nobody’s mock-nagging you and there’s precious little that will kill or even injure you. It’s just you, a bunch of islands that float in the air, and whatever you fancy doing next.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £20.70
Publisher: Rokaplay
Developer: Cyberwave
Release Date: 8th June 2026
Age Rating: 3

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