this is not my genre why do i keep doing this to myself what is wrong with me why can’t i just chop a tree and be happy about it

/sobbing

Aska is a survival-crafting, settlement builder game. You play as a Viking washed up on an island after being attacked by a frost giant. Using the material found in the environment around you, you must slowly build up a settlement and learn to survive in your new home.

Nothing in Aska will be particularly surprising to anyone who’s played any kind of survival crafting or basebuilding game. Players must manage the food, water, and (ostensibly) sleep needs of an increasingly large and complex village, battling occasional enemies, and progressing towards ever more complex tools. There is a decent amount of transparency from the outset about what tools and buildings will be available later in the game so the player can plan accordingly, but even within that planning, there is an expectation of a linear progression through a set list of improvements. Build the gathering hut to build the lumberjack hut to build the crafting hut to build the fishing hut and so on ad infinitum.

The game also requires that the player - or later, villagers - build the various buildings themselves through loading up their inventory, schlepping the materials to the build site, and then holding down the mouse button until the building is assembled. While this, again, is not particularly unique, it gets very old very quickly when I can only carry one log at a time to the building that requires eight logs that I placed halfway down the beach.

It’s this sort of hands-on involvement that is one of the more interesting elements of the game. Aska is clearly trying to be a Rimworld-esque basebuilder, but in first person. It blends in the survival-crafting elements to make that first person basebuilder more engaging, but in so doing, it tilts the tedium balance heavily towards those who enjoy survival-crafting, leaving basebuilders like me groaning as they’re forced to pick up yet another log and drag it down the wholeass beach.

It's okay. We'll drink from a puddle or something and everything will be fine again.

There’s a spectrum in gameplay between building, slow burns, grinds, and slogs, with how the game approaches the art of building determining where on this spectrum a game falls. As with any spectrum, part of this is defined by the player themselves and where they choose to place their tolerance on said spectrum. Some players are more tolerant of repetitive gameplay than others, and one player’s tedious slog is another’s perfectly acceptable gameplay loop. I’m going to fully admit that my tolerance for survival crafting loops is decidedly below most players in the genre, and that how I define “slog” is a product of that.

What can help temper that sense of tedium, though, is some compelling element, something to break up the monotony. In the case of another survival-crafting/basebuilder, Grounded, for example, that tedium is broken up through clear and visible goals the player is striving for. There is a clear goal of killing the nearby large enemy, for example, or of exploring a place that requires a specialised tool. A sense of progression fuels the player to push through the repetitiveness and towards that goal they’ve set for themselves.

On the other hand, a pure basebuilder and management game like Rimworld doesn’t have any particular objectives, but instead relies purely on the goals set by the player. However, Rimworld still maintains player motivation through nudging the player towards narrative creation and turning their base from being not just a base, but a setting for a story about the people in it. Despite being barely recognisable as people, Rimworld’s narrative engine creates an environment in which its sprites become human enough to be what keeps the player going. The player wants their colony to survive, wants to know what happens next, wants to be ready to protect their little people.

Aska has neither of these approaches. While there are villagers, they aren’t people in any meaningful sense. Their only dialogue is to complain about the most basic needs. While there are random events, they are always monster attacks, and once the player has figured out how to resolve them, there’s little tension to them. The main motivation, then, becomes building a bigger and better settlement, one log at a time.

The question I have to ask, though, is why. Why am I building this? What motivation is there to build that bigger settlement in the first place?

My job is beach.

Aska has very little in the way of story. While your main character is ostensibly seeking to regain the favour of the gods, they do so by crafting various objects and fleshing out their settlement, all the tasks one would do anyway as part of a citybuilder. However, why the character wants to regain the favour of the gods isn’t really explored. It is what the game wants you to do, and that’s meant to be reason enough to do it.

With every citybuilder I play, I always take a moment to consider its ethos, and what how it presents the act of building says about how I’m meant to feel about building. Aska’s ethos is a deeply conservative one. I do these things because they’re what’s expected of me, regardless of whether they make any sense. I build because building is what’s done. I expand because expanding is what’s done. There is no greater reason, no greater motivation, other than to do what’s expected of me specifically because it’s expected. This created a bizarre moment where, as I dropped yet another log on the beach, I realised that, moreso than most video games, there was no point to any of this. Even within the world of the game, I had no reason to be doing this. After pouring forty, fifty hours into this game, my little character would be no better off than she had been in the first hour, sitting beside the campfire, contemplating her life. If anything, she might be worse off, surrounded by empty people and ever-increasing enemies, lugging and chugging for no reason other than that that’s what was expected of her.

I turned off the game. More specifically, it crashed on me, and the lack of autosave meant that I would have to start lugging the logs all over again. It didn’t seem worth it to reload.

Developer: Sand Sailor Studio
Genre: Survival crafting
Year: 2024
Country: Romania
Language: English
Time to Beat: Does one ever really win a settlement builder?
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/0U54oblLp2k