Sandwalkers Steam Charts & Stats

Hooked

good

A fun game. Worth if you think 20 hours of gameplay is worth $20 and if you like turn based roguelites.

This is a beautiful, repetitive game with few real meaningful decisions. You have 20 actions at your disposal, but you'll usually rely on just one every single combat. Despite that, it's a great original concept that can happily soak 10-12 hours when you want a game to occupy you without requiring deep focus. I played entirely on Steam Deck and would definitely recommend for a long plane, train or automobile ride.

A decent enough hex crawler exploration game through a nicely designed desert planet, but unpolished and not a particularly deep experience. Aesthetically, I like this game very much. And this look of things ties into the actual gameplay. When one thinks of a desert wasteland adventure, they might get the idea of barren featureless lands with nothing in them- Sandwalkers is more of a thriving world of deserts and oases, just with too much sun exposure and out of control weather for the populace. Your task is to revive the great tree that once brought life and shade to the world and navigate the wilderness to find fragments. These turns it into a survival simulator (at least in concept) where you need to weigh resource scavenging, plot out routes for the most efficient travel, and so on. This kind of falls off after the first few caravans (you make a new group if the old one gets wiped out, but keep progress) when you get a handle on things and unlock some perks to make the next playthrough more doable. Each character plays a role based on their species and they're all reasonably different. I don't think I found any outright bad options, although some didn't fit into my group synergies. It was also unusual to figure out who was a tank type at first. The Protector elephant was obvious, but he's slow enough to entirely miss the first round of defending against attacks. Meanwhile, the tornado casting mage had high shields and could go first, making him the better meat shield for the front line, for example. You can also load up on a few support people, including some individuals trapped in mirrors underground... who you can have multiple versions of? Actually, let's get into that. Sandwalkers is not a polished game. Items can have negative amounts and it can cost you to sell them off. Preset walking paths just cancel midway for no reason that I can determine. My bard party member would randomly gain Exalted status instead of doing damage with his weakening attack on an enemy, etc etc. These aren't breaking bugs, as the game is not that hard by the 3rd or 4th caravan run (my 4th steamrolled 75% of the remaining game) but they're a reminder that there's loose nuts and bolts banging around under the hood of the car, even if it otherwise runs. Storywise, it's so-so. There's decent world building lore to be had and world specific terms have hypertext like pop-ups that explain them- when they work and aren't spewing broken code. But much of the resolution to story events and the memory orbs you collect come off as broken abstract snippets that don't seem relevant or lack emotional weight. I kind of wish we started to bypass this aspect in modern gaming of gathering vague notes to compose the story, because they come off as scattershot or just lacking. Unfortunately, Sandwalkers has a 'vast as an ocean, shallow as a puddle' feel to the world. Sure, there's a lot of hexes to cross, resources to find, etc- but it all just repeats very fast. You'll almost never see anything out in the world you haven't seen dozens of times. Same handful of regional enemies, same generic resources, and so on. Very few times will you come across any small locations with lore, secret treasure (very samey loot throughout the game), or anything else of note. The only real exception I had to this was while walking through a stretch of the desert near the end, I was accosted with a riddle challenge from storm spirits. This was unusual and interesting. Unfortunately, even if you fail at a riddle, you just get hit with a basic enemy encounter and the sequence ultimately wasn't a big deal despite how out of left field it came. I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy my time playing, but most of the game is on an endless repeat of whatever you saw in the first few hours. Even the end game itself is very linear and to the point. This is a very 6/10 type of experience that could have been so much more.

I'm not a fan of the current state of the game. Bugs & lack of polish: assets clipping through one another, UI disappearing randomly, event UI getting layered under the normal HUD, wonky achievement acquisition, getting negative stacks of items in the inventory, wonky hover-based tooltips, hotkeys getting unresponsive... it's technically playable, but it's a frustrating experience. I appreciate that devs have already solved many issues over the last year, but guess what, that journey is not over yet. Progression: it is cool on paper, but it's also very uneven. I had a couple of "farming" runs, then I started with lvl 3 caravaneers, completed good half of the main story, and started the next run with lvl 10 caravaneers, triple the storage capacity, two major game systems unlocked, etc - it's like going from 1e1 to 1e10 in cookie clicker in a single run. It feels like game wasn't trying to kill me hard enough. Combat: the game has the foundations of JRPG-like turn based combat, but it's very casual. You have some skills to change your positioning but it doesn't really matter (you can cast any skill from any row). You have different types of damage and resistance, but it doesn't really affect your gameplay. It feels like most fights are a stat check (which you beat easily). And there isn't even a way to speedup or disable animations, to get past the routine faster. Sandwalking: there's a surprisingly small amount of sand in this game. It's not really about overcoming hostile environments, it's about gently walking around them and getting free refills at the friendly cities. The world does not feel post-apocalyptic, it's thriving. ------------ With that said, I appreciate the original setting and the lore bits. The game delivers on the thrill of exploration. I'll be looking to get back to Sandwalkers if they get a year worth of bugfixes.