When you have to start looking towards the stars to save your own world, then you ought’a know you royally stuffed up. And that’s the case with Honeycomb: The World Beyond.

The Earth and its ecosystem is in dire peril and it looks more and more likely that the key to saving our world may lie on another. So you join a corporate space initiative to explore distant, Earth-like worlds, pack your bags, say goodbye to everything you know and love and head off into the great unknown. It’s a small price to pay if you can help bring life back to your dying world.

That’s the basic premise behind Honeycomb: The World Beyond. This cozy, adventure, crafting and survival game puts you down on the most likely Earth-like planet and sets you free to explore the undiscovered wilds and find solutions in the process. Sota7, your home for the, most likely, permanent future, is a vast landscape of alien flora and fauna, vibrant colours and untamed resources just waiting to be discovered.

In a timely manner, Honeycomb asks more of you than simply surviving and conquering these new wilds. Instead of focusing on those aspects to becoming the master of your domain, Honeycomb is more concerned with the ecological side of the narrative. As such, you’re here to explore and to understand. Humanities fate is tied to not repeating the same mistakes and to do that, there’s a more conscientious, environmentally sustainable aspect to the game.

That doesn’t mean you’re not going to be harvesting resources or crafting bases, but rather that you’re also going to be looking at giving back to the environment by consuming fewer resources. With its focus on creating a laid back adventure, you’re not going to be deforesting the local plains just to build that swanky lodge by the river. Resources are numerous and handily marked on your map and also come with a respawn timer to let you know when you can harvest from them again. It helps that, instead of cutting down an entire tree or plant, you’re just harvesting the fruit or cutting offshoots from them. The same goes for the harder minerals you need to craft with, with rocks and minerals of all types respawning in a timely manner while you only harvest pieces of rock from quarries instead of smashing apart the whole thing.

With its futuristic focus, your tools are also impressively forward thinking. You have a scanner that lets you identify all of the world lifeforms while building is handled by a portable hand scanner that uses Star Trek levels of technology to essentially 3D print whatever you want, no matter how large the scale. Crafting food is handled in the same manner but by smaller crafting machines that slowly 3D print whatever you need.

Continuing with the ecological bent, everything you build seems to be designed to work with the environment. Need to grow your own flowers? Then plop down a polination device that draws polinators to you. Need power? Then just place your buildings within the area of your power generator and everything is good to go. No pesky wiring to be worried about.

This streamlined focus to gathering and crafting is easily one of my favourite aspects of the game. You don’t have to wait too long for things to be built by your fancy machinery. Best of all, if you’re overburdened you can just plunk items down into a locker and, when things are crafted, resources will be pulled directly from there.

One of the games unique aspects is in it’s bioengineering quests. It isn’t just enough for you to find sustainable plants and lifeforms, but to crossbreed them to create the best traits that would help Earth thrive again. It’s a unique take on the taming aspect of survival games in that you aren’t taming them to work or fight for you. And as with everything else, it’s not an overly difficult task to manage.

There’s no real combat in Honeycomb either, even though not all of the fauna are excited to see you. You’re here to learn, not to destroy after all so in the event that something decides you may make a nice little feast, you can craft a tranquilizer gun to help save your skin.

As with many recent survival and crafting games, especially in the cozy genre, Honeycomb combines its story and gameplay inextricably. While emergent gameplay still exists, there’s a heavy focus on your progression and learning the gameplay mechanics been tied to the story driven tasks that you’re given to do. The story itself teaches you the mechanics while fostering the need to explore for more resources or simply to see what mysteries Sota7 hides. And yes, it does hide a few.

This, for me, is one of the games highlights in its gameplay loops as it sets clear goals for you to work towards, leaving you with less time to run around in circles trying to figure out what to do or how to do it. The other thing that Honeycomb does so well is instilling in you the desire to explore. There’s a little bit of “Gotta scan them all” going on here as the further away you get from your landing pod, the more there is to discover. Along with the fact that later technologies and equipment require materials further away from base camp. With a little mystery that you may not be the only intelligent life to walk Sota7 before, there’s a wonderful desire to plunge across every part of this planet.

Honeycomb does have one major flaw in that it leaves you with an open ending that screams: “The further adventures of!”. You know the type I’m talking about, when a character walks off into the dark symbolically. I though this was kind of weird for a game that’s gone out of it’s way to make sure you understand the stakes involved. Whether or not this is because there’s DLC or a sequel planned, I can’t say, but whether or not it resonates with you will come down to personal taste.

Visually, Honeycomb has a bit of a stylised look to it that reminded me of No Man’s Sky in its colour palette and plant designs. Its a visually pleasing and pleasant design overall, with just enough of a cartoony approach to its character models.

With story focused tasks that also serve as tutorials, Honeycomb: The World Beyond gives you a survival adventure game that manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of the genre. Weird choice of an ending aside, this is a fun, cozy, survival adventure game that was a joy to play.

Pros:

• Story focused tasks teach you the mechanics naturally
• The theme of respecting nature is a good one
• Exploring the world is fun
• Streamlined crafting systems make the game a joy to play

Cons:

• Open-ended ending that you will either like or hate

Score: 7/10

Honeycomb: The World Beyond was played on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on PC and PS5.