Survival game meets colony sim as Zelda, Palworld and Valheim collide in this Ghibli-inspired world

In some ways, Fera: The Sundered Tribes might be just another survival game. I gather berries to eat, I chop down trees for construction materials. But then I open a portal to the island floating above my head, and my villagers step through, gather up my resources, and return to the sky island above.

Not wanting to take the easy route, however, I don’t follow them through that portal. Instead, I throw out my glowing blue tetherhook, flinging myself skyward via a handily-placed grappling point before unfolding a pair of wings to let me glide safely back to our settlement. Once there, I use the wood that my villagers carted back through the portal to build them a series of yurts to sleep under, and assign out portions of berries to keep them happy.

Fera is an interesting survival game twist in that it requires you to not only build a settlement to keep yourself alive, but to keep an entire village happy. My needs, in fact, seem to be substantially less important than those of my villagers – while they each get a tent to sleep in, I’m relegated to a bedroll by the fire. 

That doesn’t matter too much, however, because I don’t plan to hang around my village for too long. Instead, I’m throwing myself off this island and catapulting around on that mix of tetherhook and glider wings, drinking in some of the Zelda-style movement and this Ghibli inspired world. Developer Massive Damage cites Princess Mononoke as a particular inspiration, and that’s something that certainly becomes apparent as we stumble upon a boss fight out in the world. While you’ll fight plenty of foes on solid ground, the aerial focus of Fera means that you also won’t be entirely safe in the sky.

I got only the briefest, most tantalizing taste of Fera during my demo at Summer Game Fest. Still, its adaptation of traditional survival game tropes combined with a beautiful world (that reminds me of another Zelda and Ghibli-inspired game I’m looking forward to) mean that if you’ve had your fill of the genre’s traditional fare, you might still find something new to love here.

Check out our list of the best survival games.