An Honest Game Review: Hytale Early Access

Hytale is a game that a few weeks ago I looked at with suspicion & doubt. I mean when a game has such a troubled development history across many years it starts to look a little less like this grandiose project and more like a "it'll be lucky to get across the line." My doubts remained all the way until release, making it hard to buy into the hype everyone else so clearly had when it's sudden revival after being taken back from Riot Games hit the news.

But then I played it...

And i'll be honest, this game has had so much love and effort put into it, you'd be hard pressed to find something that doesn't feel like an upgrade from similar games in the genre of "open-world survival". The game makes it clear that it's emulating a more "handcrafted" RPG experience than many would be used to from the survival genre, but it doesn't shy away from other aspects of these games such as the sandbox or roleplaying experiences people tend to make within them. Hytale manages to strike the fine line between making enough of a story to give you some direction & manner to progress, while staying hands off enough to allow the players to create their own stories out in the wilds of Orbis. This isn't an easy line to tow, many games lean too heavily in one direction, making the sandbox & roleplay experiences fell taped on, if they're even a facet of the game; While others lean so much in the other direction that the story doesn't feel like there's any sense to it, and it gives the world a thin veil of not being believable. While immersion isn't easy for games to emulate, particularly without realism being at the heart of game design. It's not impossible, and Hytale manages to feel immersive in many ways. You feel connected to the world you're playing in, not because of the survival, not because it's in some way checking boxes. You feel connected because the world just feels natural and living. Animals roam & exist without you, civilisations & bandits build out their statements in the world, and ancient ruins, while infrequent, give a sense that at some point, the world was teeming with life. Even if a structure exists without some loot giving it value, it gives a sense of value to the world surrounding it, and it's beautiful to see how others see this world. Many choose to preserve it to the best of their ability, keep ruins as they were, chop down trees only to replant them, keep their impact on the landscape & it's shape minimal. But others choose to meld the land to their personal vision, make quick work of resources, and gather much to build grander & grander. Although I favour the first over the second, they're both a valid way to play the game & peer into a world differently to match what you want to do.

What I like about this game is the atmosphere, the timbre if you will. It's got the feel just right for something trying to be high fantasy, but gives space & emptiness to allow the player to fill that in. The animals are adorable in the way that I find many real life animals to be adorably "friend-shaped" even if they would tear me limb from limb. I like that the progression, while simple, does very quickly ask you to explore beyond the safety of the first zone, and of that progression I like how it isn't directly tied to how skilled you are, but by how you choose to explore it's world. You can run into the current final zone with nothing but copper and turn out fine, but you are going to face a fierce challenge because of that. On the contrary, you can still just setup shop in zone 1 and just be a trader & farmer for other players to progress in your own way. This game shines, especially in multiplayer, because it's progression isn't gated by anything but just having the resources, you can just offer a service and you'll have a different but similar progression, and i love that the game encourages that level of emergent gameplay by making it's other systems as in-depth as the combat & exploration are. Farming, while a bit on the quick side, it a good way to provide stable, abundant food for both yourself & your collection of fuzzy friends. It's not a complex system on it's own, but a rewarding one that comes with the added bonus of provisioning with the chef's table to make more valuable food items. The building in the game is deep & simple to pick up, it may not be a sandbox game purely, but it sure acts like a sandbox game with the volume of block textures, types, and details you can work into a build. There's no lacking in the build palette, and the things you can build are truly limitless (unless you want to build out of pure metal). I love how the game encourages all of these systems to work in tandem too, combat & exploration are aided by good infrastructure building for storage & farms, and those farms & builders get a benefit from the bounty of exploration & combat. They all cycle back into each other in a way that feels very natural, and it lets players who enjoy seeing a game to it's pure maximum, a chance to really get into the ebb & flow of it all and get lost for hours just having fun.

Fun is the key word I keep coming back to while playing the game, I don't tend to overthink, I don't rush ahead to what I need to do next in the progression. I just sit back and let the game and my ideas mix & before I even realise i've built an entire new building just to keep our bounties from exploration sorted properly. Or I’ve gone and built a stable, and laid some paths between areas I frequent to make it easier to use mounts. Early on I risked entering the final zone to get a material that I thought would look nice for a build. I had no reason to go there outside of those blocks yet, and in the end I didn't even end up using them. But I still had fun taking a risk for some logs to potentially use to make something.

Between the fun gameplay that can emerge just by doing things a new way, and the ample depth of it's systems to dig my teeth into, I know this will be a game I can just continue to enjoy for years in a way very few games have managed to capture. I love games that feel like the unrestrain my creative itch, and those games are very few & far between, and I found this to be one of only 2 games in the last 5 years that have captured a creative itch I thought was lost permanently (I may talk about that second game later, as it had the same effect on me, but in such a dramatic way that i've sunk nearly 1100 hours into it in half a year oops).

Outside of the game I find more reasons to enjoy it too, the devs constantly listen to feedback (please add a marten/sable/stoat tameable animal please!), they are generally very fast on fixing bugs or other breakdowns, they've added many requested features like Ophidophobia Mode without so much as a question, and they're very transparent about it all. So transparent that they literally hand the player a mod development toolkit that is simple to use, yet has enough complexity for dedicated modders to dig into it for years to come. Their modded-first approach to the game let's anyone play it how they want to play it, and even modify it into totally new experiences entirely. And I can't wait until I can properly dive into the deep end with these tools instead of just taking a quick overview of what it is capable of. I've already got ideas for how I can expand on the games world, and have temptations to recreate some of my mods from other games within Hytale. The devs are also seemingly very keen on keeping development strong, and with their incredible update speed I believe it, they're independent and can just add things without bureaucracy holding good ideas back for DLCs, micro transactions or other dark pattern & predatory monetisations. They care deeply about the game & the world they've created in it, and I firmly believe that is their actual goal, To make something special.

I can't say the game is perfect, there are lots of things I wish it did better, such as making the underground more varied and giving it more unique ways to "stay down there" and have a way to survive instead of making it set dressing for ores. Making the terrain of Orbis more unpredictable in some ways, such as allowing the spawn to exist outside of a temperate zone 1, and allow cold & hot starts without making them feel like you're under-equipped. I also would love to see larger zones and more biomes per zone, more unique blocks and other goodies that make the exploration worth it. A big change I want to see is for mounts to become more useful, they feel hardly necessary pretty much the instant you have a teleporter. More tameables would be nice too, I see those foxes & want to hold one no matter how danger that noodle is. Planks being separated across the wood types rather than the beautiful logs being condensed into a generic plank type. I feel the story could be introduced better than just a marking on the compass, and a strangely out of place spawn room, but at this point these are nitpicks for a game that's in early access and just blew me away from the start. I'm certain some of these will get better, and hoping that many of my suggestions will be taken as genuine critique & desire for the game to get better.

Hytale is an excellent example of an early access game, very carefully thought out, clearly a labour of love, passionate development behind it, and of course a vision to keep going further with each update. And their clear desire to let people help steer the development of the game with cool modding features or feedback is an incredible refresher of how the industry was before corporations & shareholders superseded artists & designers.

This is an amazing game, and one I need to list as a MUST PLAY Game, well done Hytale and to all the devs who worked on it, Godspeed. I hope you make something magnificent out of it.

*please add Martens/Sables/Stoats and other Mustelidae to the game, i love the danger noodles!

Open World Survival & Creation - Voxel-based Pixelated Art Direction - High Fantasy Inspired - Heavily Moddable

Rating:

MUST PLAY