The Tribe Must Survive has a solid premise but needs some work | Hands-on preview

Having played and reviewed the rather good but decidedly grim Gord last year, I couldn’t help but draw some immediate parallels between that and The Tribe Must Survive. Both are about as positive and life-affirming as spending a wet weekend in Blackpool, both are about keeping filth-encrusted peasants alive in a forest that really, really wants to eat them. But while Gord went for a more realistic approach (I mean, as realistic as giant spiders and wiccan magic gets), The Tribe Must Survive cleaves aesthetically closer to Don’t Starve.

You take control of a bunch of mostly useless troglodytes with procedurally generated names so unpronounceable that I wonder why the developer bothered, and must survive for as long as you can against frankly staggering odds.

The preview build I played begins simply enough, asking you to build little lumber mills so your half-a-dozen tribespeople can gather and process wood. Then you need to construct a granary to store food, a few tents, and a hunting hall (which is pretty extravagantly named for something that resembles half a market stall draped in deer innards). It’s quite fun to drop newly constructed buildings around the place without waiting for a timer to countdown, and then watch your dutiful little fleabags jump up and start working without a single action from you. And then night falls and everything goes to shit in minutes.

When it’s dark you must keep your fire burning bright enough that your erstwhile villagers keep working, because the fire burns through a set amount of wood per minute determined by its brightness. And any villager not illuminated can and will get snatched by a mysterious tentacle monster. There is no limit to this, and you can be unlucky enough to lose everyone in a single night. The idea is obviously to stockpile resources in the day to survive the night, but it’s not that simple.

For a start, once Bluggleflitz has seen Borgengorp dragged screaming into the darkness, she’ll find it difficult to motivate herself to chop wood and empty the piss bucket in the morning. In fact, she’ll have a total psychotic break and become utterly useless. This happens very fast and the only way to cure the Fear is to illuminate the person for as long as it takes, but natural sunlight is apparently too cheap for these miscreants. They need firelight, which costs resources, which you can’t gather when everyone is gathered round the embers mewling into their loincloths because Nibblenocker’s gone and she was the glue that held them all together.

Obviously the idea is to keep trying and getting better, so you become more efficient at placing resource processors and thus keeping everyone’s bits and pieces attached, but The Tribe Must Survive feels massively skewed against the player. Random events can occur where mysterious visitors may ask to join you, increasing your population, or a weird old woman will ask for resources and likely curse you if you refuse. And while these are interesting in the moment, they don’t often pay off fast enough for you to see the effects, positive or otherwise. I took in a handful of wandering homeless folk and all that achieved was having six chucklefucks crying around the fire instead of my previous three.

I’ve no doubt there’s an enjoyable roguelike in here somewhere, but I found The Tribe Must Survive to be both too basic and too harsh, barely allowing you to find your feet before it starts eating them out from under you. It’s possible it needs balancing, or that I was doing something wrong, but after almost a dozen failed attempts and little noticeable progress I’m not sure I’m seeing the fun factor in it.

There are, of course, tech trees to progress down which will open up new avenues for survival and prosperity, which is likely to elevate the game somewhat. Aftrer all, this was only a preview build and there’s something likeable about the aesthetic and the atmosphere, but for me it needs more to hook the player in before everyone starts dying horrible deaths to smoke monsters.