The Planet Crafter

The Planet Crafter will not crash any awards podium, but it is the most reassuring kind of 2024 recommendation: clear in its goal, long where it needs to be, and honest about its flaws.

Where it sits, and why nobody can copy it

On OpenCritic it lands in the Strong tier, inside the top 17% of all games; on Steam it wears the Overwhelmingly Positive badge, that 96% rating built on more than 65,000 real reviews and over a million copies sold. Together those numbers say one thing — this is not a divisive experiment or a flawless masterpiece, but a sturdy genre favourite that most people enjoyed and whose weaknesses are clear without being fatal. In a crowded sci-fi survival field, it carved out room on the strength of a temperament rivals cannot reproduce.

That temperament is the un-copyable part. It runs directly opposite to its closest rival, Subnautica: that game grows you through fear, dropping you into a lightless deep and using raw dread to force competence out of you. The Planet Crafter does the reverse, coaxing you forward with the steady rewards of building, letting you grow life out of a dead wasteland with your own two hands and no one chasing you. Same genre, two completely different souls — one a thriller that wants your pulse up, the other a balm that wants it down. You can clone its Terraformation Index, copy the machines, mimic the rocket multipliers. What you cannot clone is the specific, hard-won calm of watching a dead world breathe again and knowing it happened because of you. That feeling is what protects it from imitators, and it is made of tone, not features.

Who it is for, who should skip it, which version to grab

So are you the player it is built for? If you love the slow payoff of long-haul cultivation, the sight of your own labour stacking up into visible, undeniable results, and you would frankly rather not be jolted out of that flow by combat, death penalties, or punishing difficulty spikes, then this was practically made to order for you. Its core high is the exact arc PC Gamer described, oppression giving way to relief — the long, patient work of nursing a toxic dead planet into blue skies and waving grass, and the quiet satisfaction of having done it yourself. For the right temperament it is close to perfect comfort food.

If instead you want deep narrative, tense combat, or hardcore survival stakes, you will likely come away cold; the thin story, threadbare audio, and late-game repetition will only loom larger for the wrong player. As for editions, the advice is simple: the base game is complete on its own and will happily eat dozens of hours, so start there. Only if you finish still craving the loop should you add Planet Humble for a fresh world to redo it all. For most people, one planet's worth of story is more than enough to settle into for a good long while.