• Price: $4.99 USD (currently on sale for $3.99 until May 5th)
• Developer: Gold Skull Studios
• Publisher: Ratalaika Games
• Release Date: April 14, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by PR Hound on behalf of Gold Skull Studios and Ratalaika Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I must confess that when it comes to any sort of survival scenario in real life, chances are that I would not perform so well. 😬 In video games though, I actually stand a chance. Ultra Pixel Survive is one of the latest survival games to come to the Nintendo Switch, and I liked the look of its colorful pixel art. I was also curious to see how long I’d last against the game’s hordes of enemies, so I decided to check it out!

Only the Adventurer character is available at first out of a total of 18 characters, and you’ll have to earn enough currency to unlock another one. Each character has different stats related to attack and gathering materials. Before starting a playthrough, you can choose to have Permadeath turned on or off. Once you get into the game, there’s not really much explicit instruction on what you are supposed to do (although there’s a Guide character that gives one tip at a time inside of your house). You have HP, stamina, and hunger meters to manage. I was confused at first because I thought we could eat things directly from our inventory, but that wasn’t the case.

There are a variety of structures that you can build – including a cooking pot. I didn’t love that we can only eat the food where we make it, as I would have liked it better if we could have used the items to heal wherever we were on the map. I didn’t find it to be a huge issue, but it would have been more convenient. The food situation is something you’ll want to figure out quickly, as the game will start displaying a message about your character starving. You can build a few places to plant some crops, which sets you up with a near-constant supply of food. Occasionally, a cow, pig, or chicken will show up for you to add some meat to your diet.

As soon as you have your food supply ready to go, you can really start focusing on the combat portion of survival. A few enemies will appear during the day, but a steady stream of monsters shows up at night. The combat is action-based, and it’s fairly simple. Each character has a regular attack that uses up stamina, which begins to fill back up as you wait to attack again. (Stamina does not decrease when you use tools.) Regular attacks can be short or long range, depending on the character. Other than that, they also have a charged attack that takes time to reload. NPC characters will join you after a certain number of days, and they remain with you as long as your character continues to survive.

Usually, you’ll be too busy fending off the attacks at night to do anything else. So you’ll want to focus on gathering food and materials during the day. You start each playthrough with a weapon, axe, and pickaxe. There aren’t new weapon options – instead, you have to build an anvil and a furnace to upgrade those three items (the cooking pot is where you upgrade your HP). You can also build defensive structures such as spikes, barricades, or cannons and machine guns. I thought the available structures were somewhat limited, and it may have been fun to decorate the exterior and interior of the house too.

Structures like the cannons and machine guns seemed a little flimsy, and I wish they lasted longer than a day. Thankfully, monsters can’t destroy your house or the more important items like the cooking pot, anvil, and furnace. A few monsters seemed similarly indestructible; grey slimes appeared around day 8 of each playthrough, and by day 50 I still couldn’t defeat them. One or two other monsters were also “invincible,” which I found confusing and frustrating.

It took a while for me to get used to everything, and I was defeated after surviving for around 20 days in several playthroughs. But eventually I managed to survive for 50 days (and I’m still playing that file). You can save inside your house, but the game only provides you with that one save. If you want to try playing as another character, you’ll have to overwrite that save. (One save per character may have been nice.)

The gameplay loop generally consists of cutting down trees, breaking rocks, making food, building new structures, and of course defeating enemies. It’s a basic setup, and can start to feel predictable and repetitive at times even if you’re playing as another character. Bosses show up every 10 days, and you earn treasure chests with gold and jewels every 2 days. Despite its predictability, I still found the game pretty addictive. I enjoyed unlocking new characters and seeing how much longer I’d survive in my next attempts. I liked the pixel art – the enemies make silly faces once defeated – and the music was nice. For the price, I’d recommend it.