The Tribe Must Survive landed in Early Access back in February, and I couldn’t stop raving about it. I even put together a list of beginner tips to help people who are jumping in for the first time. I was the first person to ever complete the game through the final act at the time, and heading back into the game for a final scored review has been a lot of fun.
For a look at the basics of the game, please feel free to check out my Early Access preview of The Tribe Must Survive. The good news is that the game has changed since February, but in really great ways that are starting to fill out the gameplay and make your tribe feel more like individuals. I would love to see some quality-of-life features added, but we can touch more on those later.
Essentially, The Tribe Must Survive requires you to build a community while something sinister lurks in the dark. To do this, you must manage resources and villagers, gather materials, explore new areas and build outposts, all while trying to gain more tribe members. More important, though, is managing your light source. If your villagers get caught in the dark, they can go missing.
“Every action in The Tribe Must Survive matters, for better or for worse.”
If people go missing in The Tribe Must Survive, tribe fear goes up, and balancing villager’s fear levels, along with spiritual needs, hunger, sleep, and more, can get real bad real quick. It can even start a riot. Riots will cause all kinds of chaos, halting all work and destroying some areas, stopping people from retreating from the dark and more, meaning you lose members and materials and need to rebuild. Every action in The Tribe Must Survive matters, for better or for worse.
A lot of this is unchanged from Early Access, but what is different is that there is more to manage now. Villagers opinions can now break them into factions, and factions can butt heads and cause issues. Servants of the Shephard, Disciples of the Bear and Children of the Mother are the different factions, and they prioritize four different philosophies: improvement, control, protection and freedom. Every choice you make throughout the game will help decide which philosophies and factions your tribe takes on.
What was interesting to me this time around was that I better understood how to open and manage outposts, and these outposts could have different philosophies compared to the main camp. This is a way to keep opposing factions separate, but it is still not an easy task to open and maintain outposts. The Tribe Must Survive feels like it should be a game that you keep going as long as possible, but it ends completely, so getting much past one or two outposts is a challenge.
Since Early Access, I feel like The Tribe Must Survive is a bit more unforgiving, as I struggled more this time around to get a decent number of followers and keep them happy. Some of the mechanics feel a bit unbalanced. On top of that, I want to be able to keep a game going so long I have hundreds of tribe members, rather than the game ending after a specific number of Acts. Each Act still brings a different challenge, and you can read about those in my The Tribe Must Survive Beginner’s Guide.
“Since Early Access, I feel like The Tribe Must Survive is a bit more unforgiving…”
There are challenge levels now which allow you to up the difficulty or goals in The Tribe Must Survive, which is great when the gameplay gets stale. I am still trying to figure out how to increase my tribe members early on because I want to open more outposts, so I am impressed with anyone wanting to make it harder. I still think there are some things that could be better explained, even if there was a codex or something to explain what brings people in, how factions work, and things like that. The basics are pretty clear after a few runs, but even after all my time, there are still mechanics I don’t claim to understand.
There is also more information available in the menus this time around in, including details about the factions and new buffs and debuffs. These can be found when you jump into your Tribe Member menu. You can also look at your Cohesion Menu to see which factions are taking precedence, what conflicts might arise, and who you need to separate.
I wish there was a better way to separate tribe members out in the menus, be that by faction or by what camp they are at. The same goes for buildings. Right now, you have to cycle through and either click on each building on the map or continue clicking next to scroll through every building (including crop platforms and flood barriers), which is very unintuitive and time-consuming.
It would be great to see a future update to The Tribe Must Survive that lets you operate each camp individually, with its own menus, etc. I would also love to see a way to control all buildings of the same type, to turn them on or off at once, rather than the cycle option. To convince people to sleep or participate in a ritual, I close down all other options, but as the tribe gets bigger—and especially after you build the flood barriers during the flood—it becomes very tedious to cycle through.
“What I believe Walking Tree Games GmbH is trying to accomplish with The Tribe Must Survive is a game that has endless replayability, and they absolutely have.”
I’d also love to name some of the tribe members myself, as you do in Cult of the Lamb, but that would just be a cherry on top! Oh, and a cloud save. LET ME CHANGE DEVICES, PLEASE!
What I believe Walking Tree Games GmbH is trying to accomplish with The Tribe Must Survive is a game that has endless replayability, and they absolutely have. There are achievements for new players to accomplish, added features and perks with each new run, challenge modes to increase the difficulty and goals, and now all of the spiritual options. Unfortunately, they made the gameplay loop so great that I want more.
For me, replaying the game is what has helped me learn it as well as I have, but I still feel like I am holding out hope that there will be a long-term version of this game where I can focus on building the ultimate tribe, and continue on through each Act’s challenges. I would love to have a save file that is a constant start and collapse, where I can experiment and implement challenges, but another that I focus on separately to try and build something truly great—like Sim City meets The Tribe Must Survive.
Maybe new game modes could come in future updates, but right now, The Tribe Must Survive is a great test of endurance, and I can’t count how many times I’ve said, “Just one more day,” before I shut down my laptop and go to bed. The Tribe Must Survive is an easy game to play—after your first couple of runs—and a tough game to master, and that makes a pretty damn good survival game if you ask me!
