Until North Ends Review – Easy Survivin’

Survival crafting games are the kind that grab a player’s attention and never let go. They can have dedicated player bases with hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay. With the variety of subgenres, you can find a survival game that fits your nerdy interests, from zombies and dinosaurs to monsters and aliens. With both Palworld and Valheim coming out of Early Access recently, the fans of the genre are not short of options.

But if you were looking for a smaller and cozier game, Until North Ends might be a decent choice. Developed and published by the solo dev Unknown Hex, Until North Ends is a Nordic-inspired survival crafting game that just released in Early Access. With its stylish visual design and a decently polished progression system, I was eager to explore its world.

Until North Ends starts with a series of quests and tutorials to get us started. The game doesn’t have a prominent story, and the narrative is driven mostly by small side quests and environmental storytelling. In the early stages of the game, we are guided by the tutorial, but suddenly, we get a quest to “defeat Son of Forest”, and we are left to our own devices. Now, this lack of direction is not off-putting to me, as I’ve played a lot of similarly open sandbox survival games. So, I decided to browse the crafting menus and explore a bit.

The core gameplay is to explore, gather resources, and fight enemies. Bring back the resources to a base that you set up, go through the crafting and unlock whatever you can, and go back out again. It’s a familiar and relaxing loop, and I quickly got into the groove and started to make meaningful progress. Until North Ends does a good job of pacing the progression, and the systems work well together. Higher-tier crafts require rarer materials, which can be found in more dangerous territory with deadlier enemies. You explore for materials, craft better equipment and weapons, and use them to explore further.

Exploration is the best aspect of Until North Ends. The map is procedurally generated, and discovering new biomes, seeing the new assets, and facing new enemies felt rewarding. We can also make boats and portals to make navigation faster once we have the resources for them. Some of the rare materials can only be found inside mines and dungeons that are usually filled with hostile creatures, but the gradual increase in difficulty makes the progress we make more meaningful.

Combat is relatively easy, but enjoyable. The enemies have different moves and abilities, so there is variety, and they telegraph their attacks so we can dodge out of the way. We have melee and ranged weapons, as well as magic, and it’s easy to switch up between different styles. In the starting areas, I didn’t face many threats, so the first time I ventured further, I was surprised by an enemy barely being damaged by my starting weapons and killing me in one or two hits. Combat is easy in the sense that once you learn the enemies’ moves, you can keep dodging and attacking even with low-damage weapons until it’s dead, but it makes more sense to go back to base and come back prepared.

While I was mostly enjoying the gameplay experience, I started to notice some minor bugs, which is expected in an Early Access game by a solo developer, and hopefully will be solved during development. But there was one major problem that started to creep up. Until North Ends captures the gameplay and feel of a survival crafting game, especially with the complicated systems that work well together. However, it lacks any form of survival threat to keep the player motivated. It’s what the genre is about; something is threatening our survival, and we go out to solve it. We either have to search for food, water, and other necessities, or enemies are attacking us and we need better weapons to defend against them. Until North Ends, at least in its current state, lacks any form of threat to the protagonists’ survival. This might not be a problem for players who are familiar with the genre, but this lack of direction and motivation can leave newer players wondering what they are supposed to do in the game.

To make matters a bit more complicated, Until North Ends relies heavily on navigating menus and crafting stations. While I love the stylish and old-school visual design, the UI design is a bit unintuitive and hard to navigate. Building and crafting take more time than intended, as I had to figure out how to do most things even though I’d been playing for hours. After about 10 hours in the game, I still couldn’t figure out how to properly split stacks of items into containers, and once I set up a working base, I avoided the building menu due to how janky it felt to use.

Despite its flaws, Until North Ends is an impressive Early Access release. Survival crafting games are infamous for overly complicated systems. For a solo developer, these systems are simplified to an extent, which adds to the relaxing atmosphere and chill experience of the game, but there is still enough depth to explore, and the progression feels enjoyable. Hopefully this doesn’t fall into the trap of an endless Early Access we see so often in the genre, and I look forward to the game’s flaws being addressed during this time.

Nima reviewed Until North Ends in Early Access on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game that was available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.