Out now in early access, The Tribe Must Survive is Frostpunk for people who love being afraid of the dark

rockpapershotgun.com:

Yesterday I was off sick with a fever and, as I often do when I'm laid up ill, immediately set out to consume the most nihilistic and depressing entertainment media I could find. On the film front, I watched Session 9, in which some men hired to remove asbestos from a collapsing 19th century asylum do not have a very nice time. On the game front, I played The Tribe Must Survive, a colony management sim from Walking Tree Games GmbH and Starbreeze Publishing, which is now available in early access.

There is a Byron poem, "Darkness", that could have been this game's elevator pitch, given a sufficiently sluggish elevator. In the poem, Byron describes an Earth without a sun in which "all hearts / were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light".

He paints ghoulish scenes of refugees gathering in the light of vast watchfires, composed of burning possessions. "Some lay down / And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest / Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd; / And others hurried to and fro, and fed / Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up / With mad disquietude on the dull sky". This bit specifically is an exact description of the poor NPCs grouped under my banner during my first game of The Tribe Must Survive, with the important distinction that none of Byron's sad/mad unfortunates are being abducted by spectral tentacles.

The Tribe Must Survive is set in what the devs have called a Lovecraftian Stone Age - a grotesque, primordial reality in which humans and animals appear as cave painting silhouettes with unblinking white eyes. The colony management mechanics feel like another love letter to Frostpunk's radial base design and theme of surviving the elements. The heart of each game is your campfire, with facilities such as lumber camps, tents and crop fields placed on a surrounding grid. The difference is that rather than keeping the cold at bay, the purpose of the campfire is to protect you against the shadows after sundown, which creates an