Neolithic Dawn Hands-On: Survival Of The Fittest

When I was ten years old, my family went on vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida. At EPCOT, one of Disney World’s theme parks, there’s a giant geodesic sphere which serves as both the park’s symbolic icon and as the site of a ride called Spaceship Earth, in which guests are transported along an epoch-spanning voyage through momentous shifts in human development.

At the beginning of the ride, there’s a captivating diorama depicting ancient humans working together to take down a woolly mammoth. The wind howls. The audio-animatronic cave people shift in a deadly slow-motion dance, back and forth, stabbing upward with their flint spears as the rearing mammoth swings its tusks menacingly. The cavemen scream, the mammoth trumpets with rage, and Dame Judi Dench’s voice narrates through tinny speakers somewhere behind the plush headrest of our fiberglass ride vehicle.

As a ten-year-old boy, I was captivated by this scene as it scrolled past in the artificial darkness. I shuddered to think how harrowing it must have been to be a caveman, to live so close to death in those earliest days of humanity. Then I got a Mickey Mouse-shaped pretzel and didn’t think about cavemen for the next thirty years. Until last week, when I played the brand-new VR survival game Neolithic Dawn.

Now available in Early Access on Quest and coming soon to Steam, this interesting survival game does plenty of things right, but there are also clear indicators that we’re playing an Early Access game. Most of the game’s systems and mechanics are well-implemented and engaging, yet a significant number of glitches and bugs sully the overall experience.

Neo-whatsit?

Neolithic Dawn drops players into the unforgiving neolithic era, a time spanning from around 10,000 BCE to 2,000 BCE. During this period, humans were beginning to shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one which embraced structures and group settlements. It brought about the invention of farming and agriculture, the domestication of wild animals, and a widespread distribution of tools and weapons.

The game tasks the player with learning how to live in this neolithic world, to survive and to thrive in an environment brimming with hostility and danger.

It blends most of the typical survival game mechanics and physics-based gameplay with a novel permadeath system in which every time we die, the game world advances by 20 years. When this happens, we respawn as a descendant of the one who came and died before us. Buildings and settlements we’ve built and the progress that we had made previously remains, but the world around us changes slightly with each generational respawn.

We must forage and hunt for food, stay hydrated, sleep when we’re tired, seek warmth when we’re cold, and cook and eat when we’re hungry. Failing to maintain these survival stats diminishes our overall health. If this drops too low, we die. But stay alive, and we’re able to build more settlements, explore more of the rather large game world, and unravel the celestial mystery of where we come from (both as an individual and as a people).

It’s a gameplay loop that will feel familiar to anyone who’s played survival games, but this is a double-edged sword… err, bone axe? Because while many people enjoy the sort of laborious collecting, resource management, and maintenance that comes with the survival game territory, many others simply do not. And within just a few hours, it’s quite likely that for many players, Neolithic Dawn will fall into the same trap that ruins so many survival games; the game becomes a list of chores.

The immersive nature of VR does help it in this regard, though once again, this comes as both asset and liability.

It’s so easy a caveman ca- wait…

Mechanically, Neolithic Dawn gives players a great wide range of tools and experiences. You can climb cliff faces (there’s a stamina meter), use a backpack to manage supplies, craft a massive variety of tools and weapons, and interact with animals in fairly realistic ways. Not only is it possible to hunt, skin, and butcher the rabbits, wolves, bears, and mammoths we find in the game world, it’s also possible to tame these same creatures and recruit them as pets. And yes, you can pet the dog.

Striking flints to make a spark feels great because we’re physically splashing our hands together in real space, as does roasting meat over an open virtual fire, and chucking a spear at a feral wolf. The tactility of holding and manipulating these things in the game world brings a sense of immediacy to the experience that might otherwise be lacking outside of VR, or in a VR game which relies less on realistic manipulation of the world around us. This is fun.

However, these same actions can feel tedious and unwieldy at times when the game simply breaks down. The hunting, skinning, and butchering I mentioned is just sort of… bad. Spears will randomly disappear. I hit a distant elk on the tippy top of its antler, and it toppled over like a mannequin, dead as hell. The skinning process is less skinning and more punching or flailing. The butchering is gross, but that’s to be expected.

Objects get stuck in strange places, collisions don’t always register cleanly, and combat can feel janky and dumb. In one rather baffling instance during my playthrough of the game’s early area, the all-important mystical compass simply fell out of my hand and vanished into the ground, never to be seen again. This compass, a key item necessary to the main quest, was simply gone forever.

These graphical and physics hiccups are the result of a simple truth; Neolithic Dawn is still in development. As an Early Access title, it comes with the usual list of glitches, bugs, and unpolished systems. The developers are actively addressing feedback, and promising patches and continued development, so that these early issues feel like growing pains more than evolutionary dead-ends. Presently, further work is needed.

Be warned, the following video shows skinning and butchering of wild animals.

What is most important is that the core gameplay mechanics, immersive survival loop, intriguing story, and novel respawn mechanic, are solid and engaging. Exploring the world is wonderful. Environments are vast and varied. There are moments of pure wonder and true terror – I’ll never forget when I rounded a bend in a deep, dark cave, and suddenly saw the gleaming eyes of a dozen wolves flickering in the torchlight.

All of this combines to create an experience that really feels as close as we’ll ever get to being neolithic. The game’s got good bones, and with a bit more development and taking advantage of the up-to-four-person multiplayer mode, Neolithic Dawn could easily become a standout in the VR survival genre.

It’s not the most polished experience now, but it’s certainly ambitious and interesting. If you’re a fan of survival games, enjoy the physicality of physics-based VR, and can forgive a few janky moments, Neolithic Dawn offers a fascinating, frightening, and sometimes beautiful escape into a forgotten era.

Neolithic Dawn is out now in early access on the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99.