A Quick Look at Journey Of Life – An Indie Crafting Survival Game

Journey of Life is an indie survival crafting game that takes place on a rather large island. The game play loop will be familiar territory for fans of survival crafting.

You start off on the beach of the island and are tasked immediately with crafting the basic tools available to the player such as a backpack to increase inventory space, an axe to chop down trees, a pickaxe to mine ores, a shovel to gather resources, and a hammer to build structures.

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There is a sort of realistic logic to the crafting. For example, the materials needed to build the axe is a stick, fiber rope, and a sharpened rock. While there is logic to the crafting, I found the tutorials lacking in educating the players in the game mechanics available and found myself referring to the wiki continuously. Here is the wiki for those interested in the game: https://journeyoflife.gamepedia.com/Journey_Of_Life_Wiki

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Once you start collecting resources and building more advanced structures, it unlocks more technology in the tech tree such as smelting furnaces, which allows you to refine ores. Not all items are available in the game and future patches will contain structures such as power, production automation, garages, and etc.

Here is a link to the developer’s Trello board if you would like to keep track of future developments: https://trello.com/b/Iu8L9eX5/journey-of-life-steam-offical-branch

The game does have multiplayer and this is where the game has a lot of potential. The game gave me early Rust vibes and if the developers continue what they are doing, the real life player interactions will drive this game and create unique scenarios and opportunities in the game.

As of now, the game is still in pretty rough shape with not a lot of playable content. I would recommend a wait and see approach for players that are not the biggest fans of crafting survival. For fans of the genre though, it may be worth checking out. The potential is there and I can’t wait to see what player driven interactions will do to the game as the developers finish up the game.