The Tribe Must Survive review: Fear of the dark

Impeccable vibes meet tedious micromanagement

Walking Tree Games / Starbreeze Publishing

Life’s hard, you know? One moment you’re happily farming some crops to bring food to the table and then you’re consumed by some Lovecraftian horror dwelling in the shadows because the fool leading your tribe forgot to turn off the life-saving campfire during the day, consuming all wood in your storage and leaving nothing to fend off the nightmares.

It’s the simple mistakes that destroy your runs in The Tribe Must Survive, Walking Tree Games’ colony sim with survival horror elements. In this game, a cosmic horror living in the shadows is haunting the tribes of humankind: Those spending the night away from the safety of light either won’t be seen again or come back changed – one step closer to insanity. It’s not simply the fuel and food reserves you need to manage in this game: Fear itself is as much an enemy as empty bellies are, for those driven mad by their fears may themselves become a threat to the tribe.

There is a society management component to the game as well, as your tribe members will over time splinter into factions – politically as well as religiously. Which makes sense: When there is great pressure (and an unknown horror haunting you every night qualifies, I’d say) put upon a society, there are bound to be fractures. Some folks will favor tighter control to help the tribe survive, others will stand up for personal freedom. Some will preach the good word of the Mother and hope she can guide the tribe into a brighter future, others will be convinced that the strength of the Beast is the only way forward – and sacrifices will need to be made to gain its favor.

Bringing those differences – or eradicating them by favoring certain factions over others – is as important as securing sources of wood and meat. Divided, your tribe will fall.

The Tribe Must Survive essentially takes elements from Frostpunk and Don’t Starve – and when we’re talking about sheer vibes and atmosphere, then the game executes that idea impeccably: Shadows look like something’s lurking in them, people’s eyes start glowing menacingly as they are getting corrupted, and you’ll quickly begin to associate the orange glow of fire as your only way to survive. Random events popping up have apt choices and consequences, making for solid roleplay material. While the game’s art is pretty simple, it perfectly transports the creepy feelings one would undoubtedly have when living in this world.

So, uh, your chances of survival aren't great if this happens. / Walking Tree Games / Starbreeze Publishing

It’s just a shame that the mechanical side of the game isn’t quite on the same level. The Tribe Must Survive isn’t exactly deep when it comes to resource management. Don’t expect to find elaborate production chains – there’s only a handful of goods to keep an eye on, making this aspect of the game not overly engaging.

Another issue is the lack of information about basically everything – you’ll die a lot without even knowing why and the tutorial, unfortunately, won’t be of much help, as it only gives a brief overview of the most basic mechanics. If there were other ways to gather information in-game, that’d still be excusable, but there aren’t: You’re either on your own or have to find community resources on the web.

The Tribe Must Survive is supposed to be a challenging game, but hiding crucial information and having the player run into a wall a dozen times before they realize what’s going on is not a good way of generating difficulty in a fun manner – it’s just exhausting.

Probably the biggest fun killer is the tedious micromanagement related to your campfires. As you expand over the map and gain more outposts, you’ll obviously have more fires to manage – the villagers living on the outskirts of your settlement won’t be able to make it back to your original camp in time, so you need auxiliary fires. While you can automate the signal given to your tribe’s members to seek shelter near a fire before the sun goes down every day, you can’t automate the fires the same way. You have to manually turn them on and off.

There is a button to globally toggle all of your fires, but when you have a sprawling system of fires all over the map, you’ll probably need to cut fuel costs in some areas – which means manually looking for beacons you don’t want to light and managing them directly. Every. Single. Day.

And if you happen to forget to turn the fire off and burn through all your fuel – well, then you’re done for. There are legitimate reasons for having the campfire burn throughout the day: Villagers overcome with fear will stay beside the flames, slowly recovering from their nightmares. But again, this means managing individual fires. Offering the player degrees of automation here would make things a lot easier.

Since resource management isn’t very deep and you can’t control individual tribe members, a lot of the game comes down to you waiting for the sun to go down while on the fastest speed only to manage all of your fires and go back to the fastest speed – waiting, tedious micromanagement, waiting isn’t the greatest gameplay cycle. 

That’s a real shame because the game’s ideas and style are actually really fun. When you get to make decisions like weighing the risk of launching an expedition into a new area of the map to get access to additional resources or when you're hanging on with dwindling resources during an eclipse, the game shines – only to be dulled a moment later by the realization that having a larger area to cover or suviving for another day means managing more fires every night.

The Tribe Must Survive is a solid pick-up for those who love a battle against the odds and have the patience to overcome unfair circumstances by puzzling things out over a long time – for the rest of us casuals, it’s not a fun experience.

Score: 6/10

Platform tested: PC