I have been a long time follower of the developer Pugstorm and their lovely little game named Core Keeper. I've been playing the game since 2022 at the launch of early access, and it has finally had its 1.0 release.
Core Keeper:
Core Keeper is a top down adventure sandbox crafting game in its core (pun intended), with a good amount of inspiration taken from other games in the same genre like Terraria and Valheim, to name a few, and uses the best ideas out of them all to make it's own creative spin on the genre. The game starts by you first creating your own adventurer and selecting the difficulty of the world (Casual, normal and hard).
After creating the look of your adventurer, you get to choose a background such as chef, soldier etc. These give you a small boost in certain skills that you level up during the adventure and some starting equipment. This decision doesn't set you in any set path that you have to follow, but it gives you a small head start in that skill. After making your selection, you're told the start of the story.
You're exploring a jungle with some companions when you stumble upon an interesting structure that compels you to touch it. When you do so, a sudden flash of light blinds you temporarily, and you're teleported away to an underground cavern. Behind you is a similar looking structure to the one you touched but seemingly out of power.
At this point you gain control of your character, and are left to fully explore the area at your own pace without any tutorials. The game uses the environment as a way to teach the players the basics; you can only punch, and you're surrounded by tree blocks, but after gathering some wood you see in the inventory that you have a crafting menu where you can make your first pickaxe. That's when you can truly start exploring your surrounding area. I have always personally preferred it when a tutorial is more "organic" and lets you experiment with everything at your own pace. Core Keeper heavily rewards players that experiment with the tools they have available or find, not all things are explained clearly which for newer players of this genre might struggle a bit at the start. The game doesn't punish you though for failing and encourages you to try again until you find what works for you.
The main goal the game presents to you is to survive, gear up by either crafting gear or finding gear, fight bosses and build up your home base. While doing all of this you have several skills you level up passively by actively doing those skills, examples being: Fishing, Cooking, Melee, Ranged Physical, Magic, Summoning, Crafting, and Gardening to name some. As you level these skills up you will gain skill points to put into a skill tree inside of that skill (it lights up the skill in yellow when you can do this). Every skill has very useful benefits for not only while doing something like Fishing, but also can give you for example a passive dodge chance against any attacks later down the tree. (Or as a gardener increase your critical damage.) If you make a bad selection or regret a choice you can easily get money to reset the tree without any loss of progression.
Core Keeper gives you a real incentive to do everything in your base to level all of these up, and gives you plenty of other reasons to do them above just leveling the skill. For example, when you're cooking you learn new recipes as you combine two different ingredients and learn what kind of buffs they do. Some increase magic, while others increase your mining speed. Experimentation is the key for surviving in the depths!
I found it very satisfying to level up several different skills and picking up in their trees what would fit my particular playstyle the most, in my case I wanted to go full Warlock (one of the four classes of the game, the others being Warrior, Ranger, Mage). I picked up from the mage tree skills that made me have a better mana economy while in the minion tree I focused on increasing my minion powers, from the ranger tree I picked up skills that benefit my magic such as increased crit rate etc.
The game doesn't force you into a particular playstyle, since you have three armor set slots, and again incentives you to experiment with what you find and like.
The game has a gorgeous and surprisingly detailed pixel art style going for it in its core, still, screenshots do not do it any justice on the lighting. The water movements and the animation also look great. It is to the point you thought you were playing a HD pixel art game like Octopath traveler. It is clear that a lot of passion and love was put into even the smallest of details to help you immerse into the vast world of Core Keeper.
The game has nicely composed adventurous soundtrack that helps you keep calm and enjoy your exploration in the different biomes of the world (the ocean biome in particular being a personal favorite of mine). If there was something I had to critique it would be that even if the game wants you to mostly figure everything out by yourself it wouldn't have hurt to have an NPC similar to the guide from Terraria that gives you general starting tips and how to get other NPC's to move into your home base etc. It is left to mostly the players own guess work to find out how to progress and what to build. For some players that isn't a bad thing at all but having a bit of starting guidance for the things that aren't self evident like building homes to NPC's would be helpful to more beginner players of these type of games.
The combat of the game can be seen as fairly simplistic, you do have special attacks with some weapons that do change the pace of it but it is a bit disappointing that not all weapons have special attacks (in particular swords). Also it can be hard to level up combat based skills, some of them feel like they take just a tad bit too long to level up.
Another thing , as of writing this review the game has had its 1.0 release with its introduction to the two new classes Warlock and Mage. At the moment they are supported classes with gear and weapons but there aren't that many weapons for them (in particular for the warlock) which made me as a big fan of the minion playstyle a bit disappointed, I ended up overly relying on the very first minion weapon you get because its the only ranged one you have throughout the entire game as of right now. Not to mention Mage and Warlock doesn't have a Secret quest weapon for them either unlike Ranger and Warrior (I am hoping Pugstorm addresses this in future updates!)
Closing Thoughts:
Core Keeper is a surprisingly deep and satisfying game to both new and older players of the genre, and it has something for everyone. You can also play up to 8 players in one world and divide up the tasks. Its not unheard of that you have one dedicated to base building, while others explore and gather materials etc. I have fully enjoyed my time with the game since the start of early access and will come back to it similar to how I always eventually do another playthrough of Terraria.
Here's hoping we see more updates on the game from Pugstorm and I can't wait to see what they make next in the future!
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