Resource, survival and even happiness come together in this indie gem
To talk about CrashLands 2, we have to talk about CrashLands 1. Crashlands came out in that first wave of survival crafting video games that we’re still in the craze of today. The game was made by a team of three brothers. One of the brothers was in the hospital with cancer, and his wish was to play a specific kind of game to help him through his healing process. CrashLands was born out of that sort of dream game. Fast forward a decade plus later and the team aimed to perfect everything from that first game, to really bring it to life, and CrashLands 2 was created as a sort of culmination of that dream and the prowess of the developers behind it.
In the game we play a character referred to as Purple that lands on a planet. The game is connected to the first, wherein Purple has become famous and is attending book signings and travels to new planets. In a twist of fate she crashlands on that same planet. Purple is now thrown back into surviving, scouring for resources, and crafting her way through. However the hook now is that we’re helping others as well, as Purple’s pod crashing into a civilian’s house kicks off a spree of “good will” to rebuild.
The game teaches us that to make civilians happy they need to live within a specific area. So we need to start with figuring out how to craft walls, craft floors, craft houses. And then how do we make this specific person happy? They have certain things, hangups, wants that drive them, that makes them more productive. And then that NPC becomes a person who will offee up quests to us, ideas of future things for us to craft and make and do. They sort of become the main catalysts for us to go out and explore.
And naturally, like in other games in ths genre, we won’t really hit a wall in a quest — we’ll just have to figure it out later. This game is moreso guided in that it presents us a wall, we can’t go past it, so we go back to the quest giver and eventually get a quest to make a pickaxe that we can use to get past that wall. The narrative side keeps pulling us along, making these not-really-walls a part of it, and it flows together very well.
CrashLands 2 gives us refined gameplay in the resource-survival genre, but it does so with a guided hand that moves us along with a solid, enjoyable plot. Like its predecessor it has depth and replay and plenty to do, and might become a part of our regular play for a decade on its own.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to the Editor by the Publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest for April 14, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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