Exploring the earth 300,000 years ago? The new survival game sends you back in time as an explorer

From zombies to survival. After Dying Light and Dead Island, some former developers are now working on a cozy exploration game set on prehistoric Earth

Have you ever wanted to know what our Earth looked like before humans became…intelligentand started shaping everything on our planet to their will? In the new cozy survival game Astrobotanica, you’ll soon have the chance to find out

The recently announced game is being developed by studio Space Goblin,an amalgamation of former employees from Dying Light and Dead Island.But instead of zombies, a much worse boss awaits you in Astrobotanica: science. More precisely, plant science.

In Astrobotanica you play the alien botanist Xel, whose ship crashes on prehistoric Earth, around three hundred thousand years ago to be precise. Originally, Xel was in the Milky Way in search of crops to bring home to feed his people. Now he has to deal with the dangerous animal world of a younger Earth instead.

From plants and humans

Luckily, as a botanist, Xel knows a thing or two about plants.So growing food and making medicine is easy for him. The Earth’s atmosphere, on the other hand, is more problematic because our main character doesn’t breathe oxygen. We need to find a solution to this as quickly as possible

We are not alone in our fight for survival because, as Xel soon discovers, there are already primitive humans on the former Earth – the Neanderthals. However, this species has been displaced by modern Homo sapiens over the course of thousands of years.In the course of the story, we have to gain the trust of the Neanderthals and try to communicate with them Not so easy, because the concept of language was still in its infancy back then

Although Astrobotanica contains survival elements, the gameis not intended to be a hard-core survival gamelike Conan Exiles, for example. The developers see Astrobotanica more as a cozy survival game where you can sit back and relax

During the course of the game, you also have the opportunity to upgrade Xel with skill points and thus equip him with new, useful abilities. At first glance, the so-called P.R.I.M.A.L skills system is very reminiscent of the Fallout variant S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

A specific release date for Astrobotanica has not yet been set.The developers have only revealed that their new work will go into Early Access sometime in 2025.