Survival Builder 'Nested Lands', a Proof of Concept That Could Eventually Have Potential - Preview

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The Nested Lands Alpha is now available on Steam, and I have to say, it's a pretty decent time, although as you might imagine for an Alpha build of a game, it's pretty rough around the edges at the moment.

A good example is that attempting to use a gamepad in the game's menus pretty much soft-locks you and stops all controls (including the touchscreen) from working. I had to use the touchscreen to navigate my way through, making sure not to hit any of the controls.

Nested Lands Alpha - Gameplay Impressions

The "rough around the edges" part also transfers into Nested Lands current gameplay. Although the premise is interesting, and there's some promise here, there's also the worry that the developers may be overly ambitious in what they hope to achieve.

If you've played Medieval Dynasty, Nested Lands seems to closely resemble that game in a lot of ways, requiring you to collect resources from the world and create a village from scratch, build houses, recruit NPCs to live in them, and form a community in a plague-ravaged world.

The plague is the unique mechanic here, as an ever-present threat, and you have to make sure to clear out infected plague areas near your village with torches, lest it spread and become a bigger problem to deal with, eventually wiping out your village.

And as you might expect from an open-world survival crafting game, you'll have needs to take care of as well, both yours and those of your villagers. Fortunately, these needs seemed pretty easy to handle, staying warm just requires you to stand near a fire for a bit, food didn't seem terribly hard to find, and water and cleanliness just require you to pop to the lake 20 seconds down the road to drink and clean. I'm not sure if I was annoyed or pleased about how easy your needs are to fulfill.

To be fair to the developers, they do throw up a large wall of text as you are playing the prologue to note that the game is far from finished, the game mechanics are not finalized, and this Alpha is just to show the community the direction the game is planned to go in.

Some parts of the game definitely need adjustment. Crafting, for example, requires you to wait small periods of time to do jobs, and it just feels a little bit irritating. Each rope takes 2 seconds to craft, and building a house requires 8 ropes, you aren't allowed to queue up jobs, so instead you have to sit in the crafting menu and hit the craft button every 2 seconds until you've made 8 ropes.

Some resources also felt a bit tiresome to collect, such as stones. While wood and plant fiber were plentiful, stones seemed to spawn in rather specific places, and if you ended up walking the wrong way, it could be minutes before you found a single stone. This isn't a problem once you get a pick axe, but before then, it was pretty irritating.

Combat in Nested Lands airs on the more "brutal" side, and I wasn't able to test this much on the Steam Deck, due to performance issues, but you can very much die from making a slight mistake. Bandits around the area occupy some areas and will attack on sight if you get too close, they do operate on a Ubisoft-like alert bar, meaning the game does have a stealth system, letting you take out enemies without being spotted. Combat is "ok", but there is also some mismatch between the animations and what's going on at times.

The world itself right now feels... very empty. Which I guess makes sense, as it's a plague-ravaged land, and most humans have perished. But even so, parts of the map are quite bare and barren, definitely giving the impression the developers have not fully decided on the world design yet.

Nested Lands Alpha - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Right now, I wouldn't recommend playing Nested Lands on the Steam Deck. The game lacks controller support, and as mentioned, will soft-lock you if you attempt to use one, so you'll need to select a controller layout that translates to keyboard inputs.

The performance itself is also pretty poor. I found that setting the Graphics Quality to Very Low and the Resolution to 800x500 was the best mix of being able to see what's happening, and having the best performance possible, but even then, the game only reaches 25-28 FPS in the quiet parts of the game, dropping to the low 20s in busier areas. The VRAM usage also exceeds 9GB, resulting in occasional large stutters.

Hopefully, as the game is developed, optimization will come along with it.

Final Thoughts

Nested Lands in its current state of very much a proof-of-concept Alpha. There are issues with the game's optimization, some balancing issues, as well as the fact that gamepads seem to soft-lock the game, which is being mentioned a fair bit on the game's forums.

On the plus side, the developers are aware of these issues, which is probably why they're running this Alpha so early in the game's development, so they can receive feedback on how to adjust the game before they get too far along in development.

Right now, I can't recommend you test the game on the Steam Deck, as performance is always below 30 FPS unless you really lower the resolution, but then the text becomes unreadable and the game is just unenjoyable to play.

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