Rogue Harvest is an indie rogue-like game from Genetix Studios. It challenges you to survive in a procedurally generated world by gathering resources, crafting items, growing and killing food and most importantly making sure that you have shelter for the night.

The game itself has been out in Steam Early Access now for over two months, having released November 5th 2015. The studio’s plan is to keep the game in Early Access for a few months to have people play it and give feedback so that they can improve the game before they do a full release. So, how does it stand up?

Rogue Harvest is actually quite bug-free as I played it, with the only ones I noticed being the popping of 3 achievements just as I was loading in the maps the first two times (the 3 Mushroom Massacre achievements you get for killing certain numbers of the Mushkin enemies) without me having met the conditions. That being said wandering around the world you did often find dropped mushrooms in the midst of blood splatters so maybe the world generation has a thing against Mushkins?

Rogue Harvest is also quite a difficult game. You do start with 3 tools that never wear out, but other tools you craft as well as helmets/hoods all have a durability and so do walls as you’ll find out. You do start the game with a small hut to provide some shelter during the nights, but as monsters can easily chew through walls you’ll find out very quickly that a one layer wall is not enough to keep you safe at night. Although you do get warning that night is falling and have a handy day-night clock in the top-right corner it is easy to get yourself lost in the world and be caught outside, and if that happens you just need to keep running. Outrunning the monsters is possible and when day comes most of them will retreat again, just be very careful where you’re running lest you get jumped from the front. Of course, death is permadeath in this game as it is a rogue-like so if you value your crops and tools you need to be careful what you do.

Resource-wise there’s a fair bit you can do. You’ll find wild carrots, potatoes and other veg that you can bash to gain the vegetable to eat/cook or a seed to plant that crop yourself or potentially both at once. Trees are plentiful and most give a good few logs as well as leaves which I suggest gathering a lot of to snack on and keep your energy (hunger bar) stocked up. Stone ore comes most often in little chunks on the ground but you can find big cliffsides of stone, as well as ores and sometimes big chunks of marble that you can all use for crafting. Charcoal is one of the more important items, as crafting the Oven which makes your food restore more energy needs 4 pieces of it. To get it though you need to burn down trees, and you can’t really craft anything to do it yourself without spending resources on a fire wand that you could use for other things instead. Fire flower enemies are the best way to go about the task, but watch that you don’t get caught in the fireballs instead. Burning damage is a thing in this game, along with poison damage.

However, where it’s let down a little bit is that currently there’s not really a lot to craft or do. There is going to be a story implemented fully into the game upon release, but for the moment the only parts of it come during the intro cutscene, flashbacks you can generate upon touching random strange objects you can come across (like a sign to a hospital, a plane rotor etc.) and the dialogue boxes you seem to get at preset play times during the game. There’s three crafting lists of things to make, but that’s counting the upgraded picks, axes and swords as well as all the helmets/hoods and you can only wear one of those at a time. Speaking of helmets, currently the game doesn’t have any armour slot system which means that equipping your hood/helmet is from your inventory and that takes up a space you could be using for another thing.

The studio did tweet about a week ago that they’re working on end game content for the game though, so soon there will be more things added to the game. More items, more things to craft, more loot and the full story.

Starting work on the end of game sequence for #RogueHarvest if the game doesn’t hit you emotionally, I’ve failed as an #indiedev

— Genetix Studio (@GenetixGames) January 10, 2016

If you’re interested in giving the game a go, you can find it now priced at £4.79 for UK Steam people, and $5.99 for the US. I’d say it was worth that much, because despite the lack of craftable things right now, the rogue-like element does add some replayability to the game which is worth five pounds/six dollars in my opinion.

7.5/10