This 93% positive Steam Next Fest survival game demo wants to combine Minecraft and No Man's Sky with "RPG-style depth," and so far it's actually pulling it off

gamesradar.com:

Cubic Odyssey may well be the most ambitious game in the latest Steam Next Fest. The latest from developer Atypical Games, which has dabbled in open-world survival craft before, Cubic Odyssey promises "an open-world adventure where you explore vibrant planets, craft tools, build vehicles, and fight the Red Darkness." The result, based on the game's Steam Next Fest demo, feels like Minecraft spliced with No Man's Sky, shooting for "RPG-style depth."

This is the kind of game pitch that might get you laughed out of some rooms, but as impossibly over-scoped as that sounds on paper, the demo feels pretty grounded so far – and pretty darn good, too.

This is a first-person survival RPG about galactic explorers scouring the universe to find a way to fight the aforementioned Red Darkness plague that's consumed their boxy home planet. Our adventure starts the way many survival games do, except instead of punching trees, I blast some wood with my gathering laser beam. Within the first few minutes of the game's well-paced tutorial, I'd upgraded my laser to gather faster, crafted chests to store resources and furnaces to refine them, and outfitted my cubic warrior with a gun and stun baton.

Cubic Odyssey moves at quite a clip, and I don't even have a jetpack or a working space ship yet (my ship, you see, crashed). It vaults over the usual humdrum survival checklist and gets right into its tech tree, which unfurls in acres as you create and upgrade new facilities. Here's a small thing I always like to see: sub-crafting that lets me make the ingredients for my target item right from its page in the crafting bench. This is a great quality-of-life win, and it helps make modern crafting systems feel more organic and interconnected, and less like a bunch of arbitrary currencies exchanged at vending machines that spit out guns and motherboards instead of candy and soda.

It quickly hits that classic survival game flow state. I'd better get some glass to make this chip to upgrade my