Aubelys is an upcoming early access survival strategy game on PC that blends action, RPG, and casual elements into a day-night cycle of resource gathering, settlement building, and defense against escalating threats. Players arrive in a procedurally generated world with only their fists, tasked with harvesting wood, stone, and gold during daylight hours before facing waves of darklings that emerge from portals at night.
Gameplay
The core loop centers on building and expanding a settlement across five tiers of structures, starting with basic houses and palisades before progressing to farms, mines, towers, strongholds, and advanced options like mage towers. A radial build and interact system lets players place, upgrade, and craft directly in the world without menus, while walls and palisades can be arranged with straight sections and corners to channel and slow incoming enemies.
Villagers start idle and can be specialized into roles such as lumberjacks, miners, farmers, builders, hunters, militia, knights, and mages. More workers on a task speed up progress, but players must balance food production, labor allocation, and defensive needs as the population grows. Combat uses an auto-select weapon system for punches, chops, mining, archery, and spells, supported by a damage model that includes blunt, pierce, fire, ice, lightning, and poison types with meaningful counters.
Exploration involves depleting local resources and establishing new specialized outposts near rare deposits, clearing threatening portals, and linking settlements via trading posts. Terrain and time of day affect visibility, with clearings offering open views while forests and caves provide cover or concealment. The single action button handles gathering, building, crafting, recruiting, and fighting for an uncluttered interface.
Game Modes
Solo mode focuses on personal pacing for building, surviving, and pursuing larger goals like confronting the Dark Lord. Online co-op supports up to four players sharing one settlement, dividing tasks, and coordinating defenses against the nightly horde in a PvE setup.
Online PvP lets players found rival settlements, compete for map control through raiding and outlasting opponents. Local split-screen enables two-player sessions on the same device for either cooperative building and survival or direct head-to-head PvP matches.
Procedural map generation, resource depletion, shifting portal locations, villager specialization choices, and increasing raid intensity ensure each session differs from the last, with no two runs playing out identically.
Development and Current State
Aubelys is being developed by a solo creator and enters early access as a playable foundation rather than a complete product. The current build supports the day-night cycle, basic settlement tiers, villager specialization, combat with the damage system, and outward expansion, though larger maps, additional building options, dungeons, and refined end-game objectives remain in progress.
Multiplayer features roll out in stages during early access, with PvP still in an early and flexible state open to community input on modes and win conditions. The developer plans regular updates based on player feedback through polls, forums, and in-game reporting, with a target of reaching version 1.0 within roughly a year depending on the direction chosen.
Is It Worth Playing?
Players interested in hands-on settlement management, cooperative or competitive multiplayer survival, and a single intuitive control scheme will find the foundation promising once early access begins. The emphasis on balancing labor, defense, and expansion alongside escalating nightly threats creates a clear loop for those who enjoy strategy and action hybrids without heavy menu navigation.
Since the game has not yet launched and carries no user reviews, the recommendation rests on the described systems matching personal preferences for building-focused survival with flexible play styles. Those seeking a finished experience with all planned content may prefer to wait for further updates or the full release.