I’ve never played Minecraft. I think I get its appeal - you have the freedom and ability to craft whatever you like, with people you’d like to play with, in a world that’s your own. There’s a delight in that escapism. What I have played is Terraria, a game which, I believe, offers a similar ability to exert creativity, but in a bit more of a limited space. Those limitations, those channels on creativity, are something I find helpful. I enjoy being creative, but having a goal is a helpful way to channel my thoughts in a productive direction. I am, for all my protesting, a capitalist-brained socialist, constantly envisioning futures through productivity and the lens of getting the most out of the least.

All of this to say, then, that when a game’s goal is to offer a pure creative space, I hesitate. I need boundaries to thrive, and these games of pure imagination don’t provide enough to allow that.

Pro play: Excavate the boss

Craft the World is a colony sim. You control a small, but growing colony of dwarves, set on building a new, happy home on this new, happy world, conquering it, and filling it with whatever they would like to build.

Mechanically, it’s in the same vein of Terraria - and even closely resembles it, at least superficially, but I’ll get to that - of having the player harvest resources, then use those to craft increasingly complex weapons, armour, and homes for their dwarves. The world is dark, but can be lit, and more and more of it can be built in the player’s image. Bosses provide opportunities to get new resources, and everything is a drive for new, better, and larger resources.

This is a failed colony.

I am an absolute sucker for colony sims. As I’ve mentioned before, I have put thousands of hours into Rimworld, and my Terraria playtime sits at a healthy hundred hours or so. These are my jam, and I’m always excited to pick up a new one. Craft the World’s marketing of silly dwarves and the joy of Dwarf Fortress was an obvious draw for me, and I was happy to give it a shot.

The problem with Craft the World is not in its theory. Its theory is solid. You are a dwarf in a world hostile to dwarves, but which can be turned into a friendlier one with the right application of pickaxes and ingenuity. Where Craft the World fails is in everything else.

You and I both know that’s just not true, weird monster.

The easiest place to start is with the obvious. The UI is unintuitive, resembling a mobile game, and working roughly the same. Crafting becomes tedious when every resource has to be individually dragged to a recipe. The process of accessing the full inventory of things the colony has available to it is also unintuitive, to the point that it wasn’t until my second playthrough that I figured out how to do it and how to actually start the process of building anything. When building is such a critical element of the game, making the actual process of beginning it a headache is a poor game-making decision.

This was, of course, not helped by the poor AI of the colony itself. The various dwarves of the colony did their best, I’m sure, but their best often involved doing the opposite of whatever I needed them to do. As enemies advanced on the base, they left it to go mine a bit of dirt. As I needed them to clear a tunnel, they wandered off to go drown themselves. The process of building a colony was hampered by the colonists themselves.

Craft the World also uses a tech tree to unlock new crafting recipes. This should, in theory, be fine. There is, in theory, nothing wrong with a tech tree, and it provides a nice way to have goals throughout the game. However, where Craft the World’s tech tree fails is that it doesn’t understand how to build a tech tree in a natural and intuitive way. As an example, the ability to build walls needed to build a house is locked behind a non-starting technology. To unlock it, the player needs to craft a certain number of torches, then a certain number of iron-based tools. I didn’t need torches, so I didn’t craft them. The only reason to craft them would be to unlock a later technology, creating a non-natural progression of technology. The game locks what the player needs behind tedious actions that are done solely for the sake of doing them, making the game even more of a slog than it already is.

While some of this is excusable, I was continuously left with the thought that, whatever this game wanted to do, I could find in other, better games. Terraria offers a better base-building and exploration experience. Rimworld has a better colony management system. Whatever this game was hoping I would feel, I wasn’t, and was left instead thinking of the time spent playing this as time not poured into those other, better games.

The aforementioned tech tree

As I moved through Craft the World, I could see where it was going and what it was building too, but what I didn’t see was a point. There was no reason to believe that anything that came later would be better than what came before, or that I would derive any more enjoyment from it. What I was left with was a game existing in the shadow of other, better games, without an understanding of what makes a game work in the first place.

Developer: Dekovir Entertainment

Genre: Colony Sim

Year: 2014

Country: Russia

Language: English

Play Time: Dwarfdwarfdwarf

Youtube: https://youtu.be/PSOx2EAt9Sw