Developed by Barrel Smash Studios, Oceaneers was released on Steam on April 13th, 2026.

I received a review key and at the time of writing this, I’ve put 9 hours into the game.

Fun Survival Crafting Colony Simulator

Oceaneers is a survival crafting game that is all about sending your survivors on expeditions. On these expeditions, your survivors will collect resources, try to keep islands afloat, uncover bunkers, find technology and learn about the old world. While you explore you also aim to grow your colony with more survivors! There are day and night cycles, varying weather conditions and randomized resources and survivors to discover. The art style and colors make for interesting and fun game-play.

The starting of Oceaneers

The game starts with how you choose your difficulty, I went with the default 3 survivors. You can customize their look and skills. The game starts you off on an island with limited resources. You must explore and send expeditions to other regions on the map to find blueprints and the components needed to unlock the hatch doors that lead to bunkers under the island. The bunkers contain multiple levels of interesting items that help you progress.

Survival in Oceaneers

The game has all the elements of survival such as hunger, thirst, temperature, comfort needs, and enemies (sharks!). To progress and better your island and survivors, research needs to be done to progress.

There is survival handbook that you can reference at any time that contains a codex, guides and notes (such as keycodes you uncover).

Oceaneers World and Map

You send your survivors to scout regions after which you can send expeditions to collect resources and uncover more bunkers and islands. The world map is surprisingly larger then I had expected for this game, which was a nice surprise.

Grow Your Colony

On top of the exploration, you can also bring islands back to your colony (using your raft) to have more readily available resources and space for more survivors to live.

Character Automation

The game can be challenging at times with limited resources and only 3 survivors to start. There is full automation and customization of tasks and workload. You can prioritize each job, which is a great feature.

Rating and Review of Oceaneers

In the time that I’ve played Oceaneers, it has kept me very entertained and hooked on wanting to explore more and see if I can grow my colony. Uncovering a bunker leads to a lot of excitement and surprise. The setting of the game makes it feel more relaxed, however it is very much a survival game, in which you need to be strategic with resource management and tasks. At the beginning it can feel repetitive with harvesting, fishing, cooking, etc, but as you progress and research more advanced technology, the game will become more about exploration and discoveries. The story of the game is interesting and quirky, and you will learn more about the old world as you play.

I rate this game 4/5 stars. If you typically enjoy survival crafting games (if you are a fan of games like Rimworld), then Oceaneers is worth checking out on Steam.