I have, for most of the last 20 years, been searching for my ideal survival game. It was a quest that was first sparked when playing the early beta version of Minecraft in 2009, inspired by that first moment of digging my way into a cave to survive the night and realizing that this was something I wanted in its purest form. For two decades I have played every survival game I could, trying to find the one that matched this platonic ideal that existed in my head, each falling short in some key way. And then last week I installed Icarus.
This desire goes all the way back to early childhood. As a kid born in the late ’70s, and a voracious reader in the early ’80s, I wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice when it came to pre-teen books. But my mum had all her original Enid Blyton novels, in their revoltingly racist, misogynistic original forms, and I devoured them. Not, I’m pleased to say, for their bigotry (I had good parents; they talked to me about important things), but for their extraordinarily infantile sense of adventure. Blyton, a truly wretched human being, was also a terrible writer, but if she had one skill it was conveying an adventurous freedom, where children could wander off unsupervised into the forests, mountains or valleys for days on end, discover an abandoned castle, thwart the actions of a group of gruff-voiced smugglers, and be home in time for vast chocolate cakes and lashings of ginger beer. These children would sleep in hidden caves, or in secret rooms found within abandoned towers, safe from the danger outside, but set to go back out and adventure. And it’s precisely that perfect balance between the sense of evading danger but still being able to explore in relative safety that I have always sought.
Minecraft came extraordinarily close, but the game’s greatest strength—its lack of purpose—also robbed you of a need to survive. I remember in 2011 visiting a very different version of Markus “Notch” Persson and personally pitching the need for an adventure mode to be added to the game (and this was before it even had survival mode). And yes, it eventually got achievements and some notion of an “ending,” but it’s only ever gotten closer via mods.
As the genre picked up, so many other games came so very close to matching my mental version of the ideal survival game. 2014’s first version of The Long Dark unquestionably offered me much of what I wanted, but in an environment so hostile that exploration was always a ludicrous risk. The same was true of the wonderful The Forest, with its gruesome horror twists. I was extremely taken with an early form of Raft, and had far more patience for the silly Stranded Deep than many. But it was perhaps the entirely forgotten Salt that came the closest, despite being such a barebones survival game with a peculiar focus on piracy. (It is only as I write this that I learn that a Salt 2 came out last year! What?! Oh my.)
Since the late 2010s, the genre has generally become far more focused on combat, with enormously elaborate games packed with infinitely complex systems for crafting and minmaxing, and at a certain point it all began to slip from my grasp. Sons of the Forest is fantastic (not least thanks to Kelvin) but it’s even more of a horror game than its predecessor (and a brilliant one), and I completely bounced off the horribly inaccessible game design of Abiotic Factor that everyone else is currently raving about. Meanwhile, as genre boundaries become increasingly nonsensical (the top “Survival” games on Steam right now are Resident Evil: Requiem, Marathon and Arc Raiders…) it’s harder than ever to sift through the outpouring to find anything.
But still, in all the clutter and confusion I somehow recently spotted Icarus. The latest game from Dean “Day Z” Hall, it came out in December 2021, has a whopping 29,000 mostly positive reviews on Steam, and still hits a peak of over 12,000 simultaneous players on a daily basis over four years after release. And despite its being my job to have noticed, it completely passed me by. I have no excuses. But I’m so glad to have found it now!
So why Icarus? I were more eloquent than to simply say: I get to feel safe at night, and explore in the day. But that’s truly what I wanted. Set on an alien planet, the narrative excuse here is that you’re an advance solo party attempting to establish the possibility of survival on a world where terraforming went rather wrong. You arrive in your dropship, equipped with literally nothing, and depending on the mode you’ve picked, either set out to last for the foreseeable future, or to complete some set missions before getting back in your ship and returning to (the unseen) base. Icarus‘s outside world is still a dangerous place, and there are plenty of animals wandering about who’d rather eat you than you eat them—not least the god-awful worm things that live in the caves—but it’s not impossible to wander around outside. So you’re grabbing bushes, sticks and rocks to make your rudimentary tools, then using these to craft more advanced items, until you’re eventually (and hilariously unrealistically) crafting computerized parts from twigs and string.
In this way, Icarus is an incredibly ordinary survival sim. So much so that on release it was either entirely ignored, or rather harshly critiqued. Despite being made by Dean Hall, who for a moment was one of the most respected figures in PC games development, it seems I’m far from the only person in the press to have glossed over its launch. A large part of this was due to the game’s bugginess on launch, and fair enough. But after four years of weekly updates, it’s clearly advanced an enormous amount. (I’ve had the odd thing fall through the floor, but otherwise it’s been a solid survival experience.) And it’s this very ordinariness that allows Icarus to shine! That and the fact that it’s eye-poppingly beautiful.
So many modern survival games are trying to do so much, to such complexity, that they lose that original reason for being: muddling along. It doesn’t need to be about managing a city, nor running a factory, nor controlling herds of dinosaurs (although of course that can all be excellent too), but about not dying in the dark. For me, it’s about putting together a wobbly hut and hunkering down when there’s a thunderstorm outside. It’s about venturing farther than you’ve been before, finding an item that’s going to massively advance your crafting, and then frantically racing back to your home before the night creeps in. Here Icarus delivers that experience with expert perfection, and perhaps most importantly of all, with realistic thirst and hunger.
It has been my lament for the best part of two decades that survival games appear to believe that humans require the consumption of at least five deer a day, and to drink so continuously that I can only imagine the bladder problems. And it’s infuriated me so much! It’s in large part because of these games’ insistence on having time run extraordinarily fast, and yet have you the human player stuck at regular speed, but even accounting for this you still always seem to require terrifying amounts of food. Not so in Icarus, where hunting is relatively simple, and eating is astoundingly realistic. So massive kudos for that alone! It makes such a massive difference to everything else in the game, especially when you’ve got yourself set up with the ability to cure meat and have it not go bad so fast—it means you can focus on other elements in a far more entertaining way.
However, Icarus does add one meter absent from many other survival sims: oxygen. Thankfully, this strange planet has the element available to you in rock form. It’s odd, for sure, but along with all the other things you need to do to keep alive, you’ll want to mine for O2 now and then to keep your suit stocked up. Again, build enough complicated equipment and you’ll eventually be bottling the stuff and it’ll be much less of a worry, but it’s an intriguing extra. Water, meanwhile, is rarely potable, but cleaning it, thank goodness, isn’t some gargantuan task that’ll take over most of your sunlight. A few sticks, some charcoal, and you’re good.
So with simpler sustenance, satisfying hunting, and a decent amount of the most basic resources, you could argue this removes the challenge. But that’s where Icarus completely wins me over: the challenge comes in the form of literal challenges. Basic survival is within your grasp (but still very possible to mess up, and like I said, there’s plenty out there that’s trying to kill you), so with this under control, you can now try to put your mind to more complex matters. Which is to say: quests.
There are three ways to play the game: Open World, Missions, and Outposts. The latter is essentially the game’s “Peaceful” mode, where you can just build and craft without being in much danger, although your XP gain for your character is very limited. Open World is your more traditional form of play (well, kinda, but we’ll get to that), and Missions is a collection of expedition-based quests set across three increasingly hostile parts of the planet. There are squillions of them, and even the simplest can take a good hour or more to complete. The first handful work out as a fantastic tutorial for the game, even though they’re not sold that way, and I really do recommend starting with them. But after a while abandoning all my work to start over for the next quest began to make me too sad, and so I dove into Open World. And it’s damned smart: after a few hours of surviving and crafting, you open a way to receive similar missions, or even a larger plot to work through, via a radio link.
I really should be updating my hut with sturdier building materials that I now have access to, but it’s just so charming as it is. And I really mean “should,” given just how weak it is to thunderstorms. One particularly rough storm tore nearly every wooden panel apart, until I was eventually huddled down in a pile of loosely tied sticks, rain pouring in as I waited for it to blow itself out. But I just made a repair hammer and painstakingly restored the wooden walls because I like it that way. It makes me feel safe. It makes me feel cozy. It’s the feeling I’ve wanted since I placed my first ever Minecraft torch on a cave wall and waited for the sun to come back up.
And that’s me happy forever. I have the simplest little hut, with my bedroll, a fireplace, all my crafting tables and a collection of chests, and I venture out on my increasingly complicated tasks in between getting my daily chores complete. And I’m so happy. I’m there, I’m in my racism-free Enid Blyton novel, with my perfect little hovel and no grown-ups telling me when to go to bed.
By genuine coincidence, learned after I started writing this, Icarus is coming to PS5 and Xbox on March 26. I can’t wait for more people to discover it.