Take charge of a band of space castaways as Stranded: Alien Dawn enters early access today

Imagine making all the incredible effort to get a spacecraft to another star system, only to crash it into a wild and unexplored world. That’s the gist of Stranded: Alien Dawn, a futuristic survival sim from the devs behind Surviving Mars that launches into early access today. The game puts you in charge of four survivors who’ll be up against the basic demands of continuing to exist, and facing dangerous alien creatures.

Stranded: Alien Dawn revolves around base management and gathering resources from your new home planet. Your bunch of survivors all have different skills, such as varying levels of combat experience, so you’ll have to draw on those to make it. Watch out for survivors getting fed up or tired out, although building separate rooms for each and keeping them fed and warm will help. Attacks will come from the planet’s indigenous animals too, so you’ll need to fortify your base with turrets or traps. Unless you have enough badass survivors in your group to fend them off.

The idea of running a colony on an alien planet kind of intrigues me, largely because it reminds me of the campy old TV show Earth 2 or, shudder, Raised By Wolves. Alien Dawn is a bit different from those, because if you don’t like where your survivors start out then you can just restart the game to crash them again. They’ll end up in a different spot on the planet. Does that make it a reusable spacecraft?

Devs Haemimont Games are planning to keep Alien Dawn in early access for at least six months, adding to the game and fiddling with it based on player feedback. James previewed Alien Dawn at Gamescom, and felt it seemed familiar enough to need a bit more polish. “I’d actually be quite happy if Haemimont focused the early access period on fleshing out the world,” he said. “I think there’s already good enough strategic depth here, between all the survivor needs and tech trees.”

Stranded: Alien Dawn plummets into early access today on Steam.