Polylithic

Now, I respect a game that has the courage to say, “Forget all this modern nonsense. Give me a rock.” Polylithic has a premise I should absolutely love: you're thrown into the Stone Age, you hunt, gather, build, craft, recruit members for your tribe, research technology, and slowly drag humanity out of the dirt and toward civilization. Mammoths, predators, primitive weapons, survival, building a settlement on paper, this is exactly the sort of thing an old Sensei should be eating with a wooden spoon.

Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't quite live up to the premise.

The biggest problem is that too many of the systems feel underdeveloped. Combat is one of the worst problems. Fighting should be one of the highlights of a prehistoric survival game, but the combat is fairly basic, enemy AI can be dumb, and encounters rarely have the weight or danger they should. Hunting a massive prehistoric animal ought to make you question whether you are about to become dinner. Instead, there are plenty of situations where you're just working through a mechanical loop. Sensei wanted primal warfare, but what I received was serviceable button pressing.

The settlement and tribe systems have a similar problem. There's a good idea underneath them, but they don't have enough depth to make managing your little prehistoric civilization particularly compelling for very long. You gather resources, assign people, build things, research technology and expand, but the systems don't always interact in interesting enough ways. The progression works, but it doesn't have the depth or polish of the better survival and colony games. Eventually, I wasn't thinking like the leader of a tribe. I was thinking, “What resource do I need to collect this time?”

And then there are the technical problems. Bugs, awkward AI behavior, pathfinding issues, NPCs getting stuck, strange interactions and general roughness make the experience feel unfinished in places. The world itself can also feel pretty lifeless, and exploration doesn't always deliver the sense of discovery you'd hope for. There are some genuinely nice moments, but there are just as many where you can see the seams holding everything together.

Now, before I start beating this game with the sacred Sensei stick, there is something important to acknowledge: Polylithic was made by a team of two people. Two. That changes how I look at the game, because what they attempted here is considerably more ambitious than what most two-person teams would even try. The fact that they managed to build a prehistoric survival game with crafting, building, tribal management, technology progression, hunting and exploration is impressive on its own.

But here's the based part: I don't give games extra points because the developer had fewer people.

I can respect the hell out of the two-person team and still say Polylithic wasn't particularly great. The ambition is admirable, the concept is good. There is a real game underneath all the rough edges, but I'm reviewing what I played, not the number of people sitting behind the development desk. If the combat is weak, it's weak. If the AI is broken, it's broken. If the progression isn't deep enough, it isn't deep enough. Two people making the game explains the problems. It doesn't magically turn those problems into features.

And that's where Polylithic lands for me. There is enough here to make the experience worthwhile, especially if the idea of building a Stone Age tribe sounds appealing, but there are better survival games, better colony games, and better combat systems waiting for your time. Polylithic has a genuinely interesting foundation, but it needed considerably more polish and depth to turn that foundation into something special.

I respect the two people who made it. I respect the ambition.

I just don't respect the game enough to pretend it was better than it was.

A cool prehistoric concept held back by shallow systems, weak combat, questionable AI, bugs, and a general lack of polish. For a two-person team, the ambition is impressive. As a game?

It needed more meat on the bone.