I wanted to like this game so very very much, and on the surface, it seems like it has everything I should love about a survival crafting adventure game. But it somehow misses on most levels. A very fine line that’s hard to define delineates the difference between a great game and one that just misses the mark. Unfortunately, Beyond Contact, as of 7/24/22 in early access falls on the wrong side of that fine line.

Several other negative reviews have pointed to the game’s difficulty as a problem for this game, and while that’s certainly at play, it’s also very vague and doesn’t really nail down the problem with the game currently. I’m going to try explain why this game currently misses the mark.

You get into the game and you have 15 ‘inventory spots’ for carrying around and picking up items. This is in addition to the single ‘hand slot’ item that your character has, giving you a maximum of essentially 16 inventory spaces, assuming one of your items is a hand tool / torch / etc. But before long you’ll find yourself wanting to carry around a pick axe, a shovel, at LEAST one torch (probably a few) for light and heat, some food, and some oxygen. Maybe you might even want to carry around a few healing items. So already you’re almost down half your inventory. If it’s night time, take your stack of torches, light one, and now you’ve got to carry that for 25% of the time cycle, otherwise your character freezes to death. You can drop the torch to mine items, but don’t get more than a foot or two from that torch or else you start freezing right away.

If inventory management was the only problem, that could be easily corrected, but it’s not, unfortunately. There’s a very long chain of research, which is fed by three different types of data that you collect; organic, mineral, and crystal. Don’t have enough of one or more of these, you aren’t doing research. This makes sense on paper, but at the start of the game, your character literally doesn’t know how to make a pickaxe, a shovel, club, etc, the basic gathering tools you need to survive and gather in this world. So you need to gather research materials by hand gathering things until you have enough data to do the research, and you’d better hope you don’t mistakenly begin researching something ELSE before the pickaxe or other tools, because then you’ll just be waiting even longer.

The closest analogy I can give is one that would relate to minecraft, the most popular open-world survival crafting game. Imagine if you started a game of Minecraft, and you couldn’t punch a tree, and had to make an axe to cut down a tree to get wood, but you can’t make an axe without iron and sticks, and you had to find a desert biome and hand pick up dead bushes for sticks, then find a village that has a blacksmith that has a chest that has spare iron in it…. THEN you’d better know enough to use that iron to make an axe so you can begin cutting down trees. Only now that you’ve back doored your way into an axe can you BEGIN the minecraft journey of breaking trees and making wooden tools to begin crafting.

This is what Beyond Contact does. It lets you unlock ‘knowledge’ with research FAR before you have access to the materials required for that technology. So you go off and try to find that material, only to find that you need a specific tool that’s locked behind other research that you haven’t yet opened up, or even know how to open up.

Finally, there’s the combat, such as it is. In the 6 hours that I played, everything was very difficult, and it’s not that I can’t handle difficult combat, it’s that this game isn’t designed with combat in mind. You can WASD to move and click to swing but the enemy attack animations are so quick that you’ve got to really memorize the patterns and learn how to play it in a way that will keep you alive. Get used to dying at least once or twice, or carrying around a ton of healing gel and running away, every time you find a new enemy to fight. Or possibly desperately trying to chase down little bugs that are faster than you, can burrow into the ground, and have a line of sight longer than the range of the net you can throw. By the way… these little bugs that you can’t catch or kill? Take a good 10 hits with your club to kill, and are a necessary component to your first backpack upgrade, giving you another 4 slots.

Again, I REALLY wanted to like this game and it does a lot of things right, the graphics, the voice acting, the sound, all sublime. But the problems with the game just make this one a hard pass for now. I’ll give it another look in a year or three and see if they’ve fixed some of these issues, but I can not, in good conscience, recommend this game to anyone at the current stage of development.

I wanted to like this game so very very much, and on the surface, it seems like it has everything I should love about a survival crafting adventure game. But it somehow misses on most levels. A very fine line that’s hard to define delineates the difference between a great game and one that just misses the mark. Unfortunately, Beyond Contact, as of 7/24/22 in early access falls on the wrong side of that fine line. Several other negative reviews have pointed to the game’s difficulty as a problem for this game, and while that’s certainly at play, it’s also very vague and doesn’t really nail down the problem with the game currently. I’m going to try explain why this game currently misses the mark. You get into the game and you have 15 ‘inventory spots’ for carrying around and picking up items. This is in addition to the single ‘hand slot’ item that your character has, giving you a maximum of essentially 16 inventory spaces, assuming one of your items is a hand tool / torch / etc. But before long you’ll find yourself wanting to carry around a pick axe, a shovel, at LEAST one torch (probably a few) for light and heat, some food, and some oxygen. Maybe you might even want to carry around a few healing items. So already you’re almost down half your inventory. If it’s night time, take your stack of torches, light one, and now you’ve got to carry that for 25% of the time cycle, otherwise your character freezes to death. You can drop the torch to mine items, but don’t get more than a foot or two from that torch or else you start freezing right away. If inventory management was the only problem, that could be easily corrected, but it’s not, unfortunately. There’s a very long chain of research, which is fed by three different types of data that you collect; organic, mineral, and crystal. Don’t have enough of one or more of these, you aren’t doing research. This makes sense on paper, but at the start of the game, your character literally doesn’t know how to make a pickaxe, a shovel, club, etc, the basic gathering tools you need to survive and gather in this world. So you need to gather research materials by hand gathering things until you have enough data to do the research, and you’d better hope you don’t mistakenly begin researching something ELSE before the pickaxe or other tools, because then you’ll just be waiting even longer. The closest analogy I can give is one that would relate to minecraft, the most popular open-world survival crafting game. Imagine if you started a game of Minecraft, and you couldn’t punch a tree, and had to make an axe to cut down a tree to get wood, but you can’t make an axe without iron and sticks, and you had to find a desert biome and hand pick up dead bushes for sticks, then find a village that has a blacksmith that has a chest that has spare iron in it…. THEN you’d better know enough to use that iron to make an axe so you can begin cutting down trees. Only now that you’ve back doored your way into an axe can you BEGIN the minecraft journey of breaking trees and making wooden tools to begin crafting. This is what Beyond Contact does. It lets you unlock ‘knowledge’ with research FAR before you have access to the materials required for that technology. So you go off and try to find that material, only to find that you need a specific tool that’s locked behind other research that you haven’t yet opened up, or even know how to open up. Finally, there’s the combat, such as it is. In the 6 hours that I played, everything was very difficult, and it’s not that I can’t handle difficult combat, it’s that this game isn’t designed with combat in mind. You can WASD to move and click to swing but the enemy attack animations are so quick that you’ve got to really memorize the patterns and learn how to play it in a way that will keep you alive. Get used to dying at least once or twice, or carrying around a ton of healing gel and running away, every time you find a new enemy to fight. Or possibly desperately trying to chase down little bugs that are faster than you, can burrow into the ground, and have a line of sight longer than the range of the net you can throw. By the way… these little bugs that you can’t catch or kill? Take a good 10 hits with your club to kill, and are a necessary component to your first backpack upgrade, giving you another 4 slots. Again, I REALLY wanted to like this game and it does a lot of things right, the graphics, the voice acting, the sound, all sublime. But the problems with the game just make this one a hard pass for now. I’ll give it another look in a year or three and see if they’ve fixed some of these issues, but I can not, in good conscience, recommend this game to anyone at the current stage of development.