Once Human is surprising. It’s a free-to-play open-world survival crafting game, a word salad of flavor-of-the-month genres if ever there was one, and it takes those well-worn ideas and simplifies them into relatively basic forms. And yet, here we are a few days after launch and I find that I can’t put it down. It’s still early, but so far it’s so fun, and so weird.

There’s no shortage of post-apocalyptic survival games out there, whether you’re talking about Fallout 76, Rust, 7 Days to Die, or the many, many other options. But Once Human makes its take on that setup feel unique and interesting by wrapping the end of the world around an alien infestation rather than your classic zombies or nuclear war scenarios. It’s a fun approach that, in hindsight, seems underused in the genre, and Once Human puts it to use in some really clever ways.

This alien organism has the ability to turn basically anything into a grotesque monster, living or otherwise. Sure, that shuffling and snarling person may seem like a zombie, but then it turns around and reveals it has a blinding stage light for a head. I’ve fought lightbulbs that have turned into giant spiders, evil trees, and even a bus that sprouted a really unfortunate number of giant legs and trotted up and down the road like the biggest, yellowest, and strangest centipede that has ever existed. I did not see those enemies coming, and that has kept Once Human full of surprises.

Your weaponry is fairly basic, consisting of simple melee weapons like blades and bars, as well as your general pistol, rifle, and shotgun small-arms options. They are pretty unremarkable, but it’s hard to be bored with a baseball bat when you are beating on a monster with a traffic cone for a head or trying to snipe at a massive shadow-beast boss that just as easily could have been fighting Kratos in God of War. Sure, most of the fights are resolved by flailing your melee weapon or running around in circles and shooting as you drain health bars, but the boss fights do a nice job of mixing in unique mechanics, like forcing you to kill monster spawners to make the boss vulnerable.

Once Human makes forming pick-up parties for dungeons easy. The creatures are the best looking things in Once Human, with organic and inorganic meeting in a strange, body horror aesthetic. That said, the rest of the world is pretty bland. Forests aren’t particularly lush and the same trees repeat a noticeable amount of the time. Urban areas are largely covered in drab concrete that shows signs of decay, but not to the degree that stands out in something like the Last of Us series, which seems like a missed opportunity to lean even further into the alien infestation look.

The biggest monsters are reserved for instanced dungeons, similar to classic World of Warcraft design. These fights are geared towards groups of up to four players, and Once Human makes forming pick-up parties easy. A click of a button brings up a server-wide team finder where you can browse what sort of groups other people are looking for, or start your own. Just pick what activity you are doing and interested parties will apply to join you, and you can give them the thumbs up or down at your leisure. Even as a relatively shy gamer when it comes to queueing up with randoms (I typically bring my own group of friends), I’ve had a lot of success getting groups together, and the fact that no words or other back-and-forth is necessary makes it painless even for online introverts like myself.

Outside of combat there’s a simple linear questline to follow that, so far, is a loop of going to different places and then activating things, finding things, and fighting things. Roughly 6 hours in, it seems mainly geared towards making me visit important landmarks and introducing me to Once Human’s fundamental mechanics, which is fine for now, though it will need to pick up the pace soon if it’s going to keep my interest. I do, however, appreciate how it leans into the strangeness of the world, like the time I was sent to hunt the monster that kept turning pregnant people into trees (seriously).

I haven’t uncovered the full map yet, but even in the early going it’s big enough that running from one end to the other can be a chore. Thankfully, there are a number of ways to speed that up. An early quest gave me a motorcycle that I can summon anytime, and it’s fun to zoom around on. There are also Transportation Towers to unlock, which act as fast travel points, and even a glider, which all help make the distances much more manageable.

The survival-crafting aspects benefit from being very simple. The survival-crafting aspects have me very motivated to explore, too, as Once Human benefits from being very simple and straightforward here. At the start you have very few things you can craft, but as you accumulate XP and level up you get Memetic Cyphers, which let you unlock nodes on four upgrade trees. There aren’t any gaps, and as long as you have Memetic Cyphers and materials you can progress quickly to making quality food and equipment. It’s a less-is-more approach that makes it easy to get back to the action, which I appreciate.

Gathering materials is still done via the tried and true “run around and punch trees” method, but at least early on supplies are abundant enough that heading out for some mining doesn’t feel laborious. Resources seem to grow back quickly, and there are upgrades down the line that look like they can even automate some potential time sinks. Aspiring to things like that is so important in this genre, and although how well those more advanced options are executed remains to be seen, the early stage does a good job of requiring some effort to acquire materials without being tedious.

Right now my home base is pretty rudimentary, as you’d expect for someone just getting started. It’s a wooden foundation big enough for my bed and some crafting tables – it may not be fancy, but it was easy to put together with the simple point-and-drop building system. But, since this is a shared-world crafting game, I’m able to browse other players' structures, which range from rundown shacks that make my place look like a palace, to two-story mid-century modern homes that would fit right in on HGTV. I haven’t yet channeled my inner Frank Lloyd Wright, largely because I haven’t invested the upgrade points that unlock the more interesting construction options, but I’m eager to give it a go soon.

So far I haven’t had any temptation to spend any real money on Once Human to speed that process up, either, as the monetization strategy mostly revolves around cosmetic items like weapon skins and home decorations. There is a battle pass with a premium and free track, but from what I can tell all the premium rewards are also cosmetic, while the free rewards contain some useful crafting components mixed in. Importantly, it doesn’t seem like there is much in the way of pay-to-win concerns, but I’ll be keeping an eye on that as I continue my playthrough.

Naturally I’m still well short of the endgame, both from a story and a survival crafting standpoint, but my initial impression of Once Human is surprisingly very positive. It’s simple and straightforward mechanically, which lets the absolutely bizarre world of this alien post-apocalypse shine. The creatures are horrifying in a fun way, and I’m thoroughly caught up in the loop of being ever so slightly able to craft better and better things. I don’t know where we will end up as I continue to play over the next week or so, but Once Human is off to a really solid start.