Sunshine Survival: Solarpunk

Turn your floating island into a paradise in this cosy survival game.

‣ Solarpunk
From: Cyberwave, rokaplay
Platforms: PC
Release: 2025
Genre: Survival game
Steam Page • Demo Video • Developer Site

You wake up in a field, warm sunlight washing your face. There's a gentle breeze flirting with the leaves of the trees around you. In the distance, clouds and islands float past on a blue sky.

Where are you? Who are you? Why are you here? There are no answers, but no time for questions, either. We must survive! That means we're going to scavenge materials, fashion gear, and chase tech upgrades. But we won't be chasing firepower. Instead, we're getting into farming and flying airships, automating the grind with the sun's power. We're going Solarpunk.

Survival games share several traits, while some traits belong to gameplay styles. For example, many survival games include enemies and combat. Several include disease and infection, and quite a few have elaborate and demanding food systems.

But there are survival games that exclude or simplify many of those elements, usually to offer a more relaxing experience. You're not constantly fending off hunger or hostile creatures.

Instead, the joy comes from exploring the world, discovering new technologies, and focusing on activities like building and farming. Solarpunk sits solidly in this category—if you like to nourish crops and decorate your cottage, put this one on your wishlist.

Solarpunk is a farming and automation game. There is no combat, and survival is relatively easy, as there is always some food to scavenge. To progress, you explore the islands, plant crops, replace the trees you cut down, and domesticate animals. Eventually, you automate these activities with machines and robots powered by solar and wind energy.

The demo eventually lets you build solar panels and wind turbines. You place panels and turbines that connect effortlessly to your equipment with neon tethers. In this fashion, you establish equipment such as water sprinklers and mining drills, automating your resource management. In the full game, you'll also have access to robots to further automate your expanding farmstead.

The automation is one of Solarpunk's appeals. Grinding for progress is a survival game trope. Survival games vary in how demanding they make the grind and whether you scale or automate repetitive tasks. Most of Solarpunk's demo involves manual tasks, with the airship, energy technology, and first taste of the automation only emerging near the end. But even this tiny taste is enough to show the game's vision.

📽 Demo Snapshot: A spot of farming

Automation frees up time to explore. Solarpunk's world consists of floating islands. Initially, you explore the island you start on. But after a few hours, you can fly to other islands. Sadly, the demo doesn't let players reach those islands , nor does it explain how these impact the gameplay. But they are something to look forward to in the release version.

The warm graphics embrace Solarpunk's cosy experience like a comfy blanket. Soft pastels meet bright colours, rendering an animated and welcoming world. It's the kind of game where you might just want to stand and watch the sunset for a while.

When you are not staring at nature, you can build. The construction system is very forgiving, and you can craft furniture to decorate your home. Ultimately, this game encourages you to enjoy your time here. You could spend hours on your own, diligently planting and harvesting, fine-tuning the automation, and breezily floating between islands in your airship.

But most survival game experiences improve with friends, so Solarpunk will include 4-player co-op in the full release.

The demo only provides the more advanced features near the end of its run. It takes a good hour or two of focused gameplay to get the airships and power. Though less-relentless than most survival games, Solarpunk still requires some grinding.

But that's the point of a survival game. It's about the journey, not the destination, earning your progress through the sweat of your toil. In some survival games, that means stabbing things with a stick and eating expired canned food. But in other games, you till the soil and go flying with the breeze. That's where you'll find Solarpunk.

Solarpunk is scheduled for release on Steam in 2025.

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Explore The Game with Youtube Chapters:

• 📽 01:05 Waking up

• 📽 02:00 Let's craft an axe

• 📽 08:00 Building a cottage

• 📽 11:20 A survival staple: the craft desk

• 📽 13:08 Farming

• 📽 16:35 The roof is almost done

• 📽 20:18 The research table

• 📽 24:48 Reaching up higher

• 📽 32:02 The farm is expanding

• 📽 34:49 It's a well!

• 📽 39:50 Another staple - the furnace

• 📽 52:40 This house needs a plant

• 📽 01:03:48 It's an airship

• 📽 01:05:50 Let's go flying

• 📽 01:08:15 A mysterious shack

• 📽 01:12:18 Finally, solar panels!

• 📽 01:14:00 An automated sprinkler

• 📽 01:16:20 Power the mining equipment

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