A new survival game on Steam showed me how hard it is to survive in a sunken world

With Sunkenland, a new early access survival game on Steam, MeinMMO author Britta feels like the virtual Kevin Costner in “Waterworld”. She has already survived for over 50 hours in this sunken underwater world. She reports on her experiences on MeinMMO.

What kind of game is Sunkenland? The survival game “Sunkenland” from developer Vector3 Studio has been on my Steam wish list for a long time.

Basically, the title is a classic survival game about collecting food, hunting and surviving as long as possible. But one thing is different: the world in which you have to survive has largely already sunk and is under water. A lot of things in Sunkenland are reminiscent of the film “Waterworld” with Kevin Costner and that’s intentional.

The goal is to survive as long as possible in a post-apocalyptic world through modular base building, exploration and crafting.

I won’t say no to that. And since the game is not only a single-player title, but also offers a multiplayer mode, the three of us jumped into the adventure on the first day after its release.

Our underwater expedition has lasted 50 hours so far and started with the hard realization that there is not only a lot of salt water in this game, but also a lot of things that either want to eat us or kill us.

You can see what there is to experience in Sunkenland in this video:

Either you find the snacks or become a snack

Since Sunkenland is currently still in Early Access on Steam, you have to be aware that a lot of things aren’t running smoothly yet. But that wasn’t an obstacle for us at first because we wanted to experience for ourselves what the game had to offer.

After a few settings in the character editor, which initially only offers modest selection options, Sunkenland drops us in the middle of the ocean in our underwear and kindly with an axe. All around us is water, water, water. Deep beneath lies humanity’s lost civilization.

At least we were able to spot an island close by that served as our first rescue and base.

After a fire to protect us from the cold, we comfortably ate the freely growing strawberries on our island as if nothing had happened. But trust me, these treats will be gone faster than you can say “post-apocalyptic.”

There are also other problems.

You can’t drink seawater and this one little crab on our island just doesn’t spawn often enough to provide survival food for three people.

At this point we had no choice but to dive into the depths of the underwater world of Sunkenland and try to kill a few of the big fish competently or, if we were lucky, find a rusty can of food in the rubble of civilization.

To make this quicker and more efficient, our goal was to build a floating vehicle in which you could pack your loot. Admittedly, it should also serve to separate us more specifically from the hungry sharks’ buffet.

Sailing is better than swimming: So far we have been able to unlock six different means of transport in Sunkenland – some directly or only by finding blueprints.

The range ranges from a slow, rusty 2-seater pedal boat as the worst option, to a solid 4-seater wooden boat, to two fast motorboats, a jet ski and even a helicopter. If you have fuel, sooner or later you’ll be on the road quickly.

41 places are just waiting to be discovered

We were then able to go on longer tours with our new ship. There are currently a total of 41 points of interest in the game, some of which are above and some of which are underwater.

So at the beginning of the game all we had to do was search all the higher places underwater for anything useful using the simple contents of our lungs from the ship, then expand the base and prepare ourselves for bigger things.

When expanding the base, Sunkenland motivates you with various expansion levels on a construction workbench that gives you better equipment and new building objects. However, all of this costs a lot of material. In a lost world, scrap is gold and rubber is silver.

Also, you are never safe. While exploring, we keep encountering difficulties, dying our way and fighting to get the equipment back.

Your goal in Sunkenland is not only to create a safe base in which you can survive, but also to assert yourself above everything and everyone and exterminate the NPC clans. You can decide for yourself how difficult this is using the settings.

Luckily, by stopping the regular attacks on the base, you can also enjoy valuable items. This helps to equip yourself with solid armor and weapons as well as to secure and spruce up your own base.

From simply satisfying basic survival needs, the game then evolves into a competition for the flashiest neon sign and most stylish wallpaper. Because both ultimately save us from the dreary appearance of the rusty walls of this lost world.

My conclusion about Sunkenland Survival

Sunkenland has a lot of what I expect from a good survival game and you can already completely lose yourself in the game. But it is currently far from perfect and still needs improvements.

This is what the future will bring: The good news is that Vector3 Studio is close to the players and fixes bugs quite quickly and also plans a long list of adjustments. The funniest bug in early access was quickly fixed, which meant that you could reach top speeds of over 500 km/h with a high frame rate and your non-motorized sailboat.

And the roadmap for the next few months also makes me positive that there will be some really cool things to come.

That’s why I think Sunkenland is currently a recommended must-play for all survival fans, especially in co-op mode. And the reviews on Steam are also mostly positive at 77%.

Have you already discovered the game and played it yourself? Then feel free to tell us your opinion about this underwater experience in the comments.

However, if that is clearly too much water for you, then I recommend taking a look at the top list from our survival expert Benedict Grothaus. There are drier alternatives there:

The 25 best survival games of 2023 for PlayStation, PC and Xbox