ASKA Early Access Review

ASKA is a new Viking-myth-themed survival craft. While there are already a few of these on the market, I can safely say that ASKA takes it in a pretty new direction. With a focus on community building, immersion, and fantastical elements, ASKA is certainly a viable new contender in the survival craft genre.

ASKA sees you stranded on a faraway island and tasked by the gods to do one thing and one thing only: Rebuild your tribe, braving against the dangers of starvation, the cold, and undead horrors to create a thriving Norse city. As you might imagine from that description, ASKA heavily emphasizes tribe building.


ASKA is gorgeous, and its visual splendor comes from a beautifully designed, stylized environment. Navigating the 3D world feels like stepping into an ancient, well-preserved oil painting. There are areas where the subtle lighting and painted textures work better than in others, with particularly great visuals coming when you pass through forests and see the contrast of shadows cast against brightly lit areas.

The greatest aspect of ASKA’s visuals, for sure, comes from the gorgeous color palette. It’s bright but not cartoony, feeling like something straight out of a Nordic fantasy, which, of course, is absolutely fitting for the game’s setting.

Many survival games have a production chain in crafting. ASKA has a harvest chain; Chop down a tree and gain a few sticks, as well as a long stick. You can then carry this long stick to a structure or harvest it to gather even more small sticks. This continues for every other resource node in the game, more or less. It’s a neat little system, and while more time-consuming, it adds a bit of charm and immersion to the harvesting that I enjoy.

Immersion really is the name of the game in ASKA; Building so much as the starter shelter requires you to carry logs to the blueprint, hammer in sticks and twigs, and form the building through multiple stages of building that require their own resources, tools, and animations to complete. You can even get a splinter while building, which applies a very minor bleed debuff for a few seconds.

While overall, I enjoy the harvesting and building in ASKA, it can certainly feel slow, and even as you begin to build momentum, you really feel the game’s lengthiness.

Though the concept of a survival craft game based on Norse mythology has certainly been done before, ASKA stands out with its emphasis on immersion and village building. With amazing stylized graphics and a good balance between survival gameplay and city building, ASKA is a title that’s as fun to play as it is beautiful to look at.

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