Everything's underwater but you and your friends in survival game Sunkenland

An upcoming survival game is set in a world covered by a huge ocean, with the ruins of former civilization beneath and the remnants of humanity dwelling on mobile boats and the last handful of scattered islands above the waves. Developers Vector3 Studio explicitly call out the 1995 Kevin Costner movie Waterworld as an inspiration for their game, depicting as it does a flooded world that has lost all hope of returning to land.

Vector3 intends to take the game into Early Access in the Summer of 2023. It'll be a cooperative or single-player crafting and survival game where you often dive beneath the waves to scavenge what you need. You'll also have to trade with friendly settlers in a barter system and fend off dangerous mutants and pirates.

"Explore sunken cities, build your base, craft items, trade and fight pirates as you struggle to survive on an aquatic post-apocalypse world plagued by hunger and violence," say the devs.

The trailer and gifs posted by the devs show off a pretty nice range of building parts to create your fortress from and survive on. That'll be important, since you need somewhere to keep your precious dirt to grow food crops in. Having built your base you'll need to protect it, and Vector3 has shown images of placing barbed wire, barricades, and traps to defend the base against marauding pirates and mutants.

The game will also have many kinds of ehicles to be built and upgraded. Shown off so far are jetskis, pontoon boats, sailboats, gyrocopters, as well as small and larger motorboats—some of which are even equipped with artillery-like cannons.

You can find Sunkenland on Steam or on its official website.

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An image from flooded world survival game Sunkenland — (Image credit: Vector3 Studio)

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.