Summary

Oceaneers is a survival-crafting colony sim set in a world where rising oceans have left humanity stranded on floating islands. Players manage a group of survivors, gathering resources, farming, researching technology, exploring other areas in the ocean, and expanding their colony by reclaiming and connecting new islands.

Gameplay

Before you start, you’ll need to set up the game. Here, you can decide the difficulty level of your run, as well as customize your starting survivors. Depending on the difficulty chosen, you’ll have one to four survivors to manage, with each survivor assigned to a specific role, be it Angler (someone who is more proficient at fishing than farming) or Scavenger (someone who is great at scavenging but bad at science). Of course, having more survivors meant more mouths to feed, but it also meant that you’ll have more hands to do crucial work like gathering food and salvage.

Each survivor can have traits that are beneficial to their respective roles in the colony you’ll be managing. You can choose the traits your survivors have, but you have limited points to do so. You will need to take on a boon like Anti-Intellectual, which prevents the survivor from performing research tasks, to gain enough points to get better beneficial traits like Steel Stomach, which allows your survivor to drink dirty water without falling ill.

Once done, the game drops you onto your home base – a fairly small starter island with some helpful resources and space to set up a first colony for your survivors. It’s also a permanent floating island, a criterion which is crucial as you’ll see later on, once you start venturing beyond your own quadrant and discover new islands… needless to say, some islands aren’t as permanent as your starter and will sink after a while.

Now, gathering resources, crafting, and survival are among the main aspects of the game. This includes assigning the right people, with the right skills, to do the right tasks, which, in turn, allows certain survivors to level up certain skills faster. Some skills are even gated by something called “advanced research” which they will have to train for before they can gain more experience points for that specific skill type.

Now, gathering resources is as easy as assigning a survivor to say… a salvageable floating debris, harvestable reeds, or a diggable mound of sand. Resources are all automatically stored in an inventory accessible only within that grid. Food and medicine have their own storage boxes (and eventually water barrels) that you’ll have to build in order for your survivors to access and use them. Survivors also have automation turned on, and will automatically perform tasks that they are best suited for or pending tasks that are close by when they are left idle for a while. You can customize their automation to prioritize certain tasks and even avoid others depending on their skill mastery.

Crafting, in this game, isn’t something you can do on the fly. Instead, you’ll need to build crafting stations like the workbench before you can actually craft anything. Crafting takes time, but thankfully, you can queue up several tasks at a time in this game. Of course, building things is important as well here, and considering how limited the space you start off with is, it’s nice to know that you can get full resource refunds if you decide to demolish something and relocate it elsewhere.

In terms of survival, the game incorporates some of the elements that any fan of Don’t Starve would instantly be familiar with. Aside from food and water, your survivors will also need to be kept warm and illness-free. This means getting shelter during a thunderstorm, or at the very least, don’t have them swim about in the chilly ocean for a lengthy amount of time – getting hypothermia is very unfortunate. The same goes for proper food preparation: don’t eat raw food like fish or drink dirty water (unless your survivor has the Steel Stomach trait) lest they fall ill from food poisoning or dysentery.

Hygiene is, oddly enough, another important factor to consider in Oceaneer. This means setting up proper toilets and showers so your survivors can keep themselves clean (as much as possible anyway). Having poop all over the place isn’t really great for mood or morale, which is another parameter you’ll want to keep track of. Needless to say, unhappy survivors tend not to perform best at any task you assign them to.

All of these structures and more can be unlocked via research. Interestingly, the game intentionally made research a lengthy process, forcing you to have to really decide which research to take on first. This is especially important in the early game when not having the right tech researched may mean that your survivors have little to no way of obtaining crucial necessities.

There’s also some light combat in this game, mostly from using your spear on local fauna to gather food or to eliminate hostile threats. It’s straight-up “I attack you, and you attack me”-kind of loop, where dealing the first hit, and having a weapon with better damage than your opponent will usually guarantee a win… that is, unless the animal you’re fighting has an insane amount of health, which in that case, run!

Oceaneers is a game centered around exploration as well. From the single grid your home base is located in, you can send scouts to explore and uncover the possible resource-richness of neighboring grids, as well as any possibility of recruiting a new survivor or finding a coveted blueprint page that, when combined to form a complete blueprint, will unlock a new technology. Once that’s done, you can then send expeditions to said grids to gather whatever resource you need. Note that resources that are gathered need to be shipped back for you to be able to use them in your home base, but your raft has limited cargo space. Luckily, the game allows you to “store” any resource gathered in the aforementioned “grid-based inventory” until you decide to ship the resources back.

When exploring, you’ll also encounter new islands, some of which aren’t as permanent as you’d think. These “wobbly” islands will clearly indicate their instability once you set foot on them, and if left ignored, the island will eventually sink into the ocean, dumping you into the water as well.

Thankfully, there’s something you can build to fix this – a float regulator. Setting one up and charging it up will allow you to collect all the resources you need while keeping the island afloat. This isn’t a permanent solution to the island-sinking problem, but once the island is cleared of resources, there’s really no reason to keep the regulator charged.

All of this, however, is only a small part within the world map, which in of itself consists of three types of vast oceans a.k.a. biomes, namely arctic ocean, tropical ocean, and torrid ocean, for you to explore. It’s expected that you’ll encounter new fish species to catch, new resources to tap into, and new and more advanced blueprints to uncover.

For me at least, one of the best parts of the game, aside from its fun gameplay and satisfying progression, is its fantastic UI design. It’s easy to see what your survivors are doing constantly, thanks to the panel at the top left of the screen. This is super helpful since your survivors aren’t drones that only perform tasks as told, but they will automatically work on other tasks – tasks that you might not want them to do. Everything you need to know is also laid out clearly. For instance, I love that the game made it very obvious and clear which food is about to spoil, even from the compact, icons-filled panel at the top, without having you check the food storage box manually. FYI, here’s a quick tip for you: cooking the food resets that spoilage timer.

Graphics/ Sound

Oceaneers adopts a stylized, slightly cartoon-leaning 3D art style that balances readability with atmosphere. The character designs follow the same stylized approach as well. In a way, it reminds me of Don’t Starve, albeit in a more vibrant and lighthearted way.

In terms of sound, the audio design in Oceaneers is clearly built around immersion and environmental storytelling. It’s a mix of ambient ocean soundscapes with subtle, atmospheric compositions that shift based on what’s going on on-screen. Sound effects also play a functional role. Crafting, construction, and environmental interactions provide constant audio feedback, helping players stay aware of their colony’s activity and potential dangers.

Conclusion

All in all, Oceaneers is a fun survival-style colony sim that comfortably falls between cozy and challenging. On one hand, it’s a constant struggle to make sure your survivors have everything they need to not just survive but thrive, while on the other, it’s kind of relaxing to just sail the seas, looking for items to salvage and new islands to explore, similar, in a way, to mining blocks in Minecraft. If this sounds like a game you’d like to play, know that, despite still being in early access, there is already plenty of content in the game, and well, if you’re still unsure, there’s a free demo that you can try out.