Core Keeper Early Access PC Preview

At first, Core Keeper seems simple enough, explore and survive by any means. The game's systems grow more complicated as you gain experience, discover new life, create homes, gardens, and so on. With 1 hour turning into 2, then 3, it keeps going until you lose track of time as you build the perfect base while trying to escape the tunnels you're trapped in.

Core Keeper's narrative is simple, you're an explorer who happened to touch an object in the middle of a forest. Transported into a cavern system you must mine and kill to survive and discover power sources out of the cave.

The title takes heavy inspiration from Mojang's masterpiece Minecraft but with its own take. The most striking change is the 2D visuals. Pugstorm already showcased their incredible skills with 2D sprite animation with Radical Rabbit Stew and here the visuals are just as stunning. With beautiful animations and enemies along with actions made by the player. Boss fights hidden in the depths of the cave are often indicated through loud sounds that encourage you to go out and find it. Once you do you cannot just hide in a tunnel as the creature will bypass these walls and smash through anytime to crush you.

To keep players engaged a leveling system is provided based on their actions. You can choose a class with a set of skills but as you perform actions like mining, crafting, running, and more these skills increase with a skill tree allowing you to branch into multiple skills. It can feel like a grind for the more intense skills such as crafting but given this game is meant to be played for long periods with friends players are meant to specialize in skills. 

As for the building system, it's simple with the player pointing and clicking where to place the item. You can only select items in your hot bar at the moment, so if you want to eat something it has to be in the hot bar. There's also no auto-sort option which would be great since you're gathering a lot of items but you can discard items very easier by dumping them in the trash option.

A small array of options is available to the player at the moment such as tools like pickaxes, hoes, swords, and shovels along with a pot for cooking, storage chests, crafting table, repair desk, and anvil for making armor. Likely a lot more options will be available but for now, these are the bare minimum items needed for survival.

Customizing your shelter is possible with flower pots found in hidden areas being the easiest. Much of the customization comes in gardening, creating a field of food and flowers used in making a variety of dishes that keep you from dying and add temporary buffs. 

Core Keeper has a lot of potential given and could become an outstanding survival game. Players can take on the challenge alone or with friends, creating that loop of just 1 more hour than 5 pass by. For an early access teaser, Core Keeper is incredibly impressive.
 

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed