This pretty, robust survival sim is ready to challenge RimWorld for its title

Stranded: Alien Dawn

RimWorld, the venerable deep space survival sim, was originally released in 2013 and requires less than a gigabyte of storage space. It exists entirely on a two-dimensional plane; the fauna and infrastructure looks to be constructed out of scrap paper, and characters resemble tiny, Flash cartoon jelly beans rather than flesh-and-blood human beings. That hasn’t mattered, because RimWorld’s core formula is strong enough that its most dedicated adherents routinely dump thousands of hours into their settlements. (There is no sicko quite like a RimWorld sicko.) But graphically and artistically, the game is in dire need of a fresh coat of paint.

That’s the thought I kept returning to while I homesteaded in Stranded: Alien Dawn (opens in new tab), which hit early access in October 2022 and is on the cusp of its first major content update. Yes, this is a shameless replication of the established RimWorld precepts, and yes it is almost mercenary in its predation, but maybe that’s exactly what this genre needs.



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