Subsistence

Subsistence is the only game where I can wake up, stretch, breathe in the crisp morning air, and immediately get mauled by a wolf I didn’t even see. And honestly? That’s part of the charm. This game throws you into the wilderness with nothing but hope, anxiety, and the world’s weakest starter axe. From that moment on, it becomes a daily battle between me and literally everything that moves. Wolves? Violent. Bears? Violent. Chickens? Surprisingly judgmental. The weather? Also violent. Building a base in Subsistence feels like constructing a luxury home out of pure spite. Every plank of wood is a victory. Every wall is a middle finger to nature. My base starts as a sad little rectangle, but after hours of grinding, panicking, and screaming, it becomes a slightly less sad rectangle with a door. Progress. And the hunters? Oh, the hunters. These dudes show up like they’re on a corporate team‑building retreat and I’m the icebreaker activity. They roll up, shoot at me, steal my dignity, and leave. Meanwhile, I’m crouched behind a bush eating raw berries like a feral woodland creature. But here’s the thing: I love it. I love the chaos. I love the suffering. I love the fact that every day in Subsistence feels like a new episode of “Will Alan Survive or Will a Bear End His Career Again.” The game is unforgiving, unpredictable, and occasionally rude — but it’s also incredibly satisfying. Every tiny win feels like I’ve conquered the universe. Every time I don’t die, I feel like a genius. Every time I do die, I blame the wolf because it’s never my fault. Subsistence isn’t just a survival game. It’s a psychological experiment, and I am failing beautifully.

i like the game and how difficult it is. for having an EA title it really lacks any meaningful updates and or end game content. adding paid skins into an underdeveloped game is not ok at all. id love to see some real content added. when that happens i will change this review.

Bought this game on a sale literal years ago and realized I never gave it a spin. Wished I did when I still had the refund window, since less than an hour was pretty much all I needed to figure out that resources and balance quite simply do not exist, with no controls to change that in the super undercooked settings of starting a world. I imagine how you would possibly have a "good run" in this game is entirely RNG with what you get in the first handful of crates you find. The natural resources are WAAAY too spread out, and one species of plant is apparently the only one that can be made into fibers for the obscenely expensive early game tools. Apparently your guy needs a whole forest of these special brambles to make a single bow, and you can forget making any clothes early on to not freeze to death if you don't happen to luck out with a crate with biofuel in it. Also I imagine the dev must be terrified of going outside as the game implies their under the impression that apex predators exist with the density of benches within a well-funded park. Fortunately they seem to be essentially blind. Unfortunately the rabbits and chickens seem to have an alliance with them as they run straight to them to get away form the poor sod human you are trying to catch them with a hatchet, mostly because the dev thinks shooting a chicken with a 9mm pistol would atomize it into inedible debris. The particular problem with this is their too fast to catch without their ai breaking, and you need their feathers to make arrows to kill them the "right" way. So you get to play a fun catch 22 and inevitable protein deficiency. The game looks like it has interesting mechanics, but I'm going to assume their not actually that well made with how terrified the game seems to be about you getting anywhere and potentially interacting with them with how acutely keen it is on starving you of any resources or any real, organic way of obtaining them. A lot of the reviews are like 2-3 words long so I'm assuming this game is also getting review pumped to maintain its lofty "mixed" status, or appealing to people incapable of speech. Guess you get to decide which.

Man I want to recommend this game so bad. It has fun moments and its a great idea. But this latest patch took 8 months and is just tone-deaf. Resource acquirement is purely based on loot crates that are hard to see and are RNG, making it VERY grindy. There are no ways to modify the game either. You can play it on easy which is far too easy. Normal, which is actually pretty difficult even for survival/crafting game experts like myself. Or hardcore permadeath. Be prepared to spend a lot of time simply running around looking for camo boxes on the ground that may or may not give you what you need. Dev seems passionate about his game but refuses to listen to players. We're 9 years into this game; still in Alpha, still with bugs and still with zero way to customize your gameplay experience. Play the game exactly as the dev wants you to or don't play it at all. I'm choosing the latter until changes are made. Check back in 5 years maybe.

This game has an insane amount of potential but it truly does fail to reach that said potential. This game is so much grind but so little reward, and the very few updates that are put out dont really add to the game and sometimes make it even more grindy. It will take you hours to get the resources and ammo to attack the enemy bots, and even when you do that the rewards just barely make up for it, considering ammo is so rare for seemingly no reason. And dont even get me started on the shooting mechanics, this game has the worst shooting in any video game ive ever seen, the shots dont even line up with the sight and recently the dev added a camera sway when aiming which makes it even worse. Updates also have been taking forever to come out, and although it is a solo dev, updates barely add anything sometimes just being a cable car or controller support. The dev also never listens to the community, and there still isnt mod support to make the game a little more bearable, although he said he wanted to work on it 3 years ago. Unless you play with multiple people or dont mind not getting rewarded for your hard work, dont invest time into this game, everything you do is pointless as you will never reach a point where youre not constantly getting screwed by the game. EDIT: The ADS sway replaced the horrible aimcone system for the weapons but my opinion still has not changed. The weapons are still mostly horrible to use and missing just a few shots will leave you devastated as getting a lot of ammo can be extremely tedious. This game is difficult for about 5 hrs and then its just tedious the rest of the way through. This games difficulty is purely in the amount of grind it takes to do any meaningful progress and most updates just make it even more grindy.

I'm writing this review since it bothered me to see its "mixed" score from recent reviews. This game is named Subsistence for a reason. It's a slow paced game where you'll literally live a virtual life as a survivor fighting the environmental challenges of seasons, wildlife and scavenging. That means it's a heavy grind game, you won't be building your vehicle so soon and that's why the sense of accomplishment every time you get something is much more satisfying. Because it literally took years to get it. You can turn off hunters for an even more chilling experience where all you'll do is listen to the environment sounds (no background music, love it) and live your routine of grinding. I personally leave them activated but only in revenge mode, that way there's that additional challenge whenever I have to dive down to the underground caves searching for minerals that are obtainable only there and makes the modern weaponry available worth grinding and upgrading. One more thing that people should know before bashing the game is that ColdGames is a one-man-army company. Yeah, you heard it right: a single human work. While there are a lot of games out there backed up by teams of dozens that are sh1et compared to this one and provides nothing new, we are periodically getting new stuff, fixes and answers whenever we ask for something. Take this into consideration before going after the guy to complain about something specially if it isn't game-breaking stuff. If you are looking for a more action paced game with more fighting/shooting, low grinding system and shortcuts to get your stuff you'll most likely be disappointed but I still recommend you to try it. You might get surprised with how this can be relaxing if you're not the type of person that focus on getting to highly-optimized-meta-endgame as quickly as possible and are just looking for something to spend some time chilling.

Terrible game. - The whole early/mid game is a RNG fest. You need to find random loot boxes in the wild to get mats to progress. Possible the whole game cycle is RNG fest. - EA game but no dev commands/console. - Dev tries to make this game more "realistic". random npc survives point blank shot gun shot to the face. - more than half my play time is running back to base, because food, esp vegetables is a rare resource that takes 3 business days to grow. and is faster to just reset. - Dev doesn't know that difficult =/= tedious. Just like adding more adds to a boss to make it "harder" - Survival game, yet no melee. hitboxes are terrible. swinging ax is like swinging with T-rex arms.