Cubic Odyssey may well be the most ambitious game in the latest Steam Next Fest. The latest from developer Atypical Games, which has dabbled in open-world survival craft before, Cubic Odyssey promises "an open-world adventure where you explore vibrant planets, craft tools, build vehicles, and fight the Red Darkness." The result, based on the game's Steam Next Fest demo, feels like Minecraft spliced with No Man's Sky, shooting for "RPG-style depth."
This is the kind of game pitch that might get you laughed out of some rooms, but as impossibly over-scoped as that sounds on paper, the demo feels pretty grounded so far – and pretty darn good, too.
This is a first-person survival RPG about galactic explorers scouring the universe to find a way to fight the aforementioned Red Darkness plague that's consumed their boxy home planet. Our adventure starts the way many survival games do, except instead of punching trees, I blast some wood with my gathering laser beam. Within the first few minutes of the game's well-paced tutorial, I'd upgraded my laser to gather faster, crafted chests to store resources and furnaces to refine them, and outfitted my cubic warrior with a gun and stun baton.
Cubic Odyssey moves at quite a clip, and I don't even have a jetpack or a working space ship yet (my ship, you see, crashed). It vaults over the usual humdrum survival checklist and gets right into its tech tree, which unfurls in acres as you create and upgrade new facilities. Here's a small thing I always like to see: sub-crafting that lets me make the ingredients for my target item right from its page in the crafting bench. This is a great quality-of-life win, and it helps make modern crafting systems feel more organic and interconnected, and less like a bunch of arbitrary currencies exchanged at vending machines that spit out guns and motherboards instead of candy and soda.
It quickly hits that classic survival game flow state. I'd better get some glass to make this chip to upgrade my drone to find this ore to craft this bench, and I'm gonna need to gather wood to make charcoal to smelt the sand into glass, so I might as well hit this pocket of exposed ore by those trees, and I can't forget stone to beef up the base before night falls and the creepy-crawlies come a-knockin'. And on and on. The sci-fi setting enables useful scanners and other finders that smooth out the searching part of the grind.
It looks sharp, almost like an HD Minecraft texture pack but with admirable commitment to a more freeform voxel look, and Cubic Odyssey immediately feels comfortable and intuitive to play. That said, it's almost distractingly hilarious the way your character's limbs flail about on-screen whenever you jump with nothing equipped.
Judging a purportedly massive survival game based on a brief demo session is like reviewing a tablespoon of sand from a desert, but what's here is rock-solid. I sometimes get bored or overloaded with games like this, but even without the massive fun multiplier of eventual co-op, Cubic Odyssey seems very promising. It's out later this year, and I'll be keeping an eye on it.
