Summary

ASKA is a brilliant blend of survival games with a colony sim, complete with a fun Viking theme. Here, you have to survive in the wilderness with nothing but your bare hands and resourcefulness, but you don’t have to survive alone! Build homes for the villagers you can summon using powerful Jotun blood shards, and have them automate various aspects of village building, be it resource gathering, farming, or even building stuff. Explore a massive world filled with danger and deal with any enemies that may come your way. Will you and your people survive?

Plotline

There isn’t a whole lot of details about the land you found yourself on, and how this rather mystical world works, but like most games, you ended up in this foreign land in a shipwreck… likely while you’re out sailing with your fellow Vikings. Being the sole survivor, you’ll need to get to work to ensure you have everything you need to survive the elements and, of course, your own body’s needs.

However, it isn’t long before you discover that this land contains deposits of powerful Jotun Blood Shards, which will allow you to summon new Viking villagers to help you not just to survive but eventually, to build a thriving village to call your own.

Gameplay

ASKA starts off much like most survival games do – you end up shipwrecked on a foreign land with nothing except the rags off your back, and you’ve got to figure out how to survive… and fast! If you’re familiar with most survival games, you should be able to really ease into the gameplay. Nothing much is different at this stage of the game, where ensuring your own survival is, and should be, your top priority.

This means picking up resources you can find either on the ground or on bushes using your bare hands. However, you’ll need to improvise by using those resources and crafting tools that will allow you to harvest stronger materials – materials that can be used to build sturdy enough structures to form the basis of your home’s foundations.

Interestingly enough, you’ll find that you can mine for Jotun blood shards pretty early on in the game, which you can then fuel the Eye of Odin, allowing you to summon your first villagers. Note that villagers in this game come with up to five traits – some good, some bad, and some that are somewhere in between – and you can actually pick which villager to summon depending on the two traits you can view via the Eye of Odin. So, if you need a woodcutter, try to get a villager with a proficiency in that area. However, the remaining three traits the villager will get are entirely random, and you might just get something that can be somewhat problematic, like having a villager with a big appetite.

Anyway, once you have enough villagers to man most of the key resource-gathering structures, namely the stonecutter, the woodcutter, and the foraging hut, you’ll be able to basically automate the resource-gathering process, freeing you up to do some building and exploring.

ASKA has a really fun and unique building system. Not only will you have to level the ground prior to building anything, but you can actually see the framework of the building you’re constructing, which is pretty cool. Buildings can also be upgraded, and upgrades come in two kinds: One, you’ll add “attachments” to the main building, such as adding the Weaver to the Workshop, where you craft your tools. The second type involves “leveling up” the current building, allowing it to be operated by more villagers, for instance. There’s no need to raze down the previous building, which I absolutely like, and it's cool to be able to see the framework of the new building design layered over the old one as you work to upgrade the building.

Crafting is crucial here, be it tools or food, or anything in between. However, thankfully, all of these can be automated as long as you have the resources and the manpower to do it. That said, it does take a while to set up proper automation where any input from you personally becomes unnecessary. Personally, I enjoy discovering new cooking recipes by testing and trying to cook various ingredients. This is further expanded once you build better cooking places, including the ability to make soups instead of just grilling meat and mushrooms. Note that raw food can get you and your people ill, and well, cooked food, especially the more complex ones, tend to come with added benefits like extra perks that last for a limited time.

Exploration is also another important aspect of the game, since resources closer to home will eventually run out, and you’ll need to expand your resource-gathering area. There are several points of interest that you can find along the way, as well as different enemy varieties… usually stronger ones as you move further inland. I should also point out that there are events that will occur, which may cause enemies to attack your village, which calls for rallying your villagers, since defending it alone can be fatal at times.

There’s not much complexity when it comes to combat, with the focus mostly placed on numbers (the more villagers pitching in, the better chances of winning) and strength of weapons used (it’s all about crafting better, higher-grade weapons). You can’t dodge the enemy or even roll away. You can jump, but bunny hopping doesn’t really help here. Thankfully, you can always run when things get hairy, but you’d want to do that as soon as you can, since some enemies hit hard. Your villagers can be killed by enemies, but they tend to run away rather than engage once their health reaches a certain low level. You can summon the militia for a brief moment to help if you have the Eye of Odin upgraded.

Like all survival games, dying can be inevitable sometimes, especially if you are caught off guard. However, dying isn’t the be-all and end-all in this game. You can choose to respawn, which means you’ll lose everything in your inventory the moment you die, or you could try to salvage things by sacrificing one of your villagers’ souls to resurrect yourself with everything intact. Regardless of which way you choose, you’ll still be able to return to the game and continue where you left off… well, essentially.

Now, ASKA may feel more slow-paced than many other solo survival games, but it really nails down that process; that experience; that feeling of being able to build an entire village from the ground up with your own hands… well, albeit with some NPC help later on.

The AI for the NPCs is really well-done here. They are competent enough to work with as long as you provide enough work area coverage in which the resources they collect are available, and sufficient tools, food, and water to keep them going. You can even customize when they work, to make full use of the traits they have, be it night owls or early birds.

Despite being early access, the game is already very well-developed. Granted that there are still some performance issues to knock out, and perhaps more content to be added, ASKA is already worth its asking price and more! Definitely a game fans of the survival and colony sim genres would want to play!

Community

ASKA supports online co-op, allowing you to build and develop your village with up to three friends. As a game that focuses on teamwork, this is a great game to play with your friends and to see if you all have what it takes to survive as a team.

Graphics/ Sound

ASKA uses a rugged, stylized 3D aesthetic with strong Nordic / Viking inspirations. The visual tone is earthy and natural, and the architectural designs of the buildings are mostly rustic in style. Overall, the graphics in this game aim for a blend of gritty realism and mythic fantasy to bring alive a world that feels harsh and is shaped by both human labor and supernatural threats.

In terms of sound, the game features a blend of Celtic-inspired music and natural ambiance, from the patter of heavy rain and the crash of thunder during storms, to the chirping of crickets at night and the chatter of wildlife. You’ll even hear the mischievous cries of smolkr, the rabbit-like creatures notorious for stealing and damaging your stuff. There's even the iconic heartbeat sound that plays if your health becomes too low.

Conclusion

ASKA does a strong job at creating a Viking survival game that feels both epic and grounded. Its art style supports the gameplay, reinforcing the harshness of nature, the weight of seasons, and the grit of survival. While some visual rough edges remain (character animations, performance scaling as the settlement grows), the atmosphere is compelling and the world believable. For fans of survival sims, Norse lore, or base-building in a mythic rustic setting, ASKA already has a lot to offer, and its ongoing development promises even more.