I really can't recommend Aska, a viking-themed survival village manager in the style of Soulmask or Bellwright. It's not terrible, but it's also not very good (yet).

Aska leans into the village management part a bit more heavily, with a focus on building work stations. Unlike Soulmask where the "you're a hero with powers" is front and center, in this one I felt like a villager, building out town infrastructure and trying to get new residents to do the work for me. This is where things immediately start to fall apart.

The villagers don't seem very good or smart, and the dense and ill-explained UI doesn't make it much easier. There seems to be a lot of idling around, but even when they work, there is limited storage on their gather stations so you can't really get too far ahead so be prepared for the nearby forests to be littered with junk. Storage is really intended to be through a complex warehouse system, which requires dedicated haulers. Hauling will not seem important compared to gathering and crafting activities, so be prepared to have essentially no storage. Compare this with Soulmask where you can quickly set up a great filtered storage system and have your villagers smartly use it. Here the each villager will only work their assigned station and that's it. Back to the scattered junk, I'm sad to report that everything seems to rot, including wood logs, sticks, bones, etc, so you will be wasting things along the way.

The pace of the game and the village growth also seems off. It's slow. It takes a while to gather what you need to summon another villager or build something. The work stations don't feel all that impactful with so few villagers. In Soulmask, they cover this by allowing 1 villager to work many stations and build a priority queue. If those tools are here it is not apparent. So the village doesn't feel self-sustaining. I am out doing most everything and sometimes the villagers save me a bit of time with a resource I might need.

There are also some sort of scaled rabbit pest that is mostly too fast to hunt without abusing the coastline, that will eat your wood with little recourse. Why torment players like this? Perhaps I should build a wall or something? Who knows, as the game never explains.

That gets into the last part, which is the tutorial is not very good. It needs to be far more detailed and explain better how systems work, and what is expected. There is an attempt at it with an unusual wisp-like quest giver/reminder, but just put it in a clear and obvious quest chain and let players work through it.

Perhaps the game gets great at 10 or 20 hours, but I don't see the reason I'd want to put the time in to see. With the very slow development page over the last year (work is happening but it seems about the same to me as a casual player since 2024), my confidence is not high. Hopefully I'm wrong and can revisit in another 1-2 years to see a polished, fun experience. It's not that now, though.

Aska, This game if you like the type of civilisation building game, Where you painstakingly build up your empire and start to have everything automated only for that one f****** villager that takes a cart full of materials straight through a F******* Drauger field and leaves the damm cart behind leaving your outpost delayed again

Other than that, With the recent Smolker farming, The devs show to really care about a game in early access, it's not like other projects that end up abandoned. If you like the idea of a little settlement game maybe give this one a shot
Devs tho it'd be nice for like a corpse harvesting role give the stone cutters somethin, hopefully we get an equivalent for eggs like a giant bird or somethin

I love survival games. Not this one. The tedium is off the charts.
1. Movement speed is a serious problem. You do everything so slow. Get ready to spend hours performing tedious tasks to keep the village running (at the early stage of the game). When one tedious task is complete you have 3 more things to do. All at a snail's pace.
2. Combat is simplistic. Swing, block, dodge. That's it. This would have been acceptable in a survival game 10 years ago.
3. Everything has a durability bar. You made arrows 2 days ago? Well, they rotted out. You want to get stocked up on rope? Nope.
4. There are survival settings on start up so you can tailor your game. Kudos for that. If you are 10 hours into your game and realize the game isn't balanced to your liking, you can't change it. You have to start over. Ten hours of tedium gone. You will audibly sigh when you have to hunt again in 2 days because all of your food is rotten only because hunting is NOT fun.

I might stick with it to see if things get better. I might not. This game has fundamental design flaws. Don't know if it will ever be good. I regret my purchase.