Away From Life Review (PC)

Stranded Deep taught me that life as a castaway can be the cruelest of mistresses to tame. Conan Exiles, on the other hand, taught me that you shouldn’t trust even the most primordial facets, especially if they’re a mirage on a barren island and far, far away from civilization. But Away From Life introduces a new lesson for me to ponder — that solitude and reckless abandon come in all forms of negative energy. It teaches—no, tells me that survival isn’t for the fittest of folk, but for those who are brave enough to tread far beyond the comforts of the shoreline, to embrace whatever looms behind the curtain of an unchartered land that houses more secrets, more mysteries, and far more threats than in any other tropical haven. It doesn’t fill me with hope, or even with the answers that I need to keep a head firmly above water. Instead, it just hands me a predicament on a small piece of parchment and tells me to adapt with the rolling tide of punches.

Life, at least as a castaway, was never going to be a picnic. Like in Stranded Deep, it was to be an uphill battle that mostly consisted of foraging for sticks to make campfires; a small piece of protein to curb an insatiable hunger; and slowly but steadily venturing just a little further away from home to explore the contents that loomed deep beneath the surface. It was, however, to be a different journey. The opening phase, not so much. But the latter sections—the interludes of the two major plot points—was to introduce more for me to explore. It was reaching that point in the timeline that was the problem.

Away From Life embraces that triggering moment—the sudden urge to hit the ground running and find whatever resources are available to help you survive just “one more night.” It doesn’t give you a lot to work with, though it does give you the basics—a small plot that pertains to a helicopter crash, a remote island, and the monolithic task of needing to build a shelter, fashion tools from the rubble and bark, and to slowly begin construction on a raft that might just take you home after several hours of mindless foraging and hunting. You don’t have any advantages, and you have little to no survival skills. Rather, you just exist as a mere mortal who yearns to survive and claw their way back home.

If you’ve endured one of these types of survival games before, then you should know the hook. Similar to the other games in the thread, it pulls you into a barren world where resources are scarce, upgrade trees are unnecessarily difficult to navigate, and even the smallest creatures are an absolute pain in the backside to catch and slaughter for just a slither of protein. It’s the same deal here, with various building blueprints, weapons, tools, and other items of equipment. The objective, in short, is to survive long enough to make inward travel a strong possibility and not, say, a hopeful prospect that will lead to aimless wandering and pointless grafting.

While Away From Life might not do anything to redefine the survival experience, it does add its own stripes to the existing formula, with its own livery of inland secrets, hidden areas, and creative possibilities. To add, it presents itself as clean and intuitive, with a trove of familiar gameplay mechanics and an in-depth survival-crafting system that allows you to explore a number of different avenues, whether it’s combat, exploration, or base-building. There isn’t much of a storyline to unearth, but that’s to be expected from a castaway sim, to be fair. It is what you make of it. It’s a nonlinear experience, and therefore, a game that you can mold to your own strengths and desires.

There is something that makes Away From Life a cut above the rest, and that’s its inclusion of a co-op mode. With the aid of friends, you can tackle all that there is to see and do ashore, which includes foraging for shared supplies, crafting shelters, and hunting wild animals to source protein, and so on and so forth. It’s still the same experience, but with a shared sense of purpose and a communal spirit. That in itself goes a long way when it comes to survival games, truly.

While there’s still a good amount of room for growth here, Away From Life does have a great foundation to build on, with plenty of areas left for it to veer into as time progresses. It might not be the greatest survival game of its kind, and it might not add all that many layers to the familiar blueprint. Even still, there’s a solid game here that ought to appeal to the target demographic. The question is, does it make for a better game than, say, Stranded Deep or Green Hell?

Verdict

Away From Life steers its raft into the same desolate waters as most castaway survival games of its kind, not with the intent to fully replicate existing nodes on the tree, but rather, to introduce its own elements to the ecosystem so that it might appeal to fledgling survivalists who simply crave the opportunity to endure insufferable odds and unforgiving landscapes. It might not do anything particularly well, but it does provide a firm backbone for a solid survival game that can leave you itching for two sticks to rub together for hours. And that’s all that a survival game needs: a slither of hope—a frail benchmark that makes you want to survive against the wrath of the world and claw just a little deeper into its depths.

While I personally wouldn’t put Away From Life down as a perfect survival-crafting game, I can certainly vouch for a lot of its signature components. From a graphical standpoint, it’s a good-looking game with a lot of gloss and technical polish. Granted, the gameplay itself doesn’t deviate much from what you would have seen in alternate worlds, but it certainly taps into all of the right aspects of a long-lasting survival story to make a well-rounded experience.