Given the fact that I’ve clearly established that the typical survival game tends to struggle to keep my attention, I’m always fascinated to see how different developers have tried to make them more accessible and engaging. There’s no doubt that elements of the genre have some appeal, whether it's the need to explore or to work on crafting different items that will help you advance, but either the difficulty or plain dullness of some of them have made it a genre that can be hard to love. Recent efforts to move this style of play in a more cozy direction have been of note though, since there are elements of the genre that do pair nicely with more casual-friendly play, it’s just a matter of where the intensity dial has been set for any given game.

As you may have guessed by the title, I Am Future is absolutely focused on providing a cozy-friendly survival experience, and for the most part it does just that. The staple activities of slowly exploring, collecting resources, and crafting new items and materials in order to continue advancing the story and the area you’re able to explore. You’ll need to try to do your best to tackle numerous disciplines over the course of the game, whether it’s cooking, farming, fishing, building a relationship, managing some minions you’ll be able to create, and more. 

While this variety of activities you can engage in does at least help to diversify what you’ll be trying to focus on, it also leads to a pretty obvious complaint, and that’s the fact that many of these areas feel poorly implemented. Whether that’s a matter of quirks in the controls, some issues with getting through interfaces, or the sometimes trial-and-error nature of being successful, the base effort to set the foundation for fun can be seen pretty clearly, but there’s no question the competition has handled many of these areas more effectively. I do at least appreciate the attempt to reach out to more casual players, even including a dial that can help tamp down the difficulty further if you’d like to lower the stress level of everyday survival, but this is an effort that feels like it could have used more time to add polish and tighten up the overall experience.