Wayward: a fantastic sandbox survival roguelike set on a hostile desert island

While browsing RogueBasin , I happened across the wonderful Wayward , a browser-based graphical roguelike with echoes of Ultima Online, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft. Which means: Survival! Crafting! Treasure! An ace chiptune soundtrack! And lots of other things worthy of !s. The game's currently in beta, but I didn't notice any missing features or bugs - Wayward strong like ox. You can play it right here , and you totally should if you like desert islands, survivalism or hitting rats with twigs.

Like all good things, creator Vaughn 'Drath' Royko's Wayward starts with your character washing up on a beach, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. The tile-based/turn-based movement marks the game out as a roguelike, but with a heavy survivalist element: genre staples such as treasure chests and levels have seemingly been done away with in favour of crafting and Elder Scrolls-style learning by doing. There is also swimming, and sharks (a la the screenshot at the top of this post).

If you'd rather play Wayward offline, there's a handy downloadable version located here . Oh and here's a trailer for beta 1.0:

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.