A weird little colony settlement management type game with the same sort of vibe as Raft in the early game, and incremental/automation in the mid to late game.
You start on a single wooden platform on an island, and your job is to simply survive. The world around you is almost entirely ocean, but that doesn’t mean you’re completely screwed. Materials will float past you and allow you to extend your platform and reach, and from there you’re able to build a water pump, purifier, and a farm in order to support yourself and keep yourself alive. There is meter management, but after the first hour or so it becomes so irrelevant as to basically never matter, at least for yourself.
Before long you’ll encounter your first surviver. A bunch of travellers floating in rafts on the high seas looking for a place to call home. So the task is simple: Build them a house, cook them a meal, and bring them aboard. More hands means more productivity and you can’t stand there pumping water your whole life, you’ve got materials to catch and a settlement to build. Each settler has their own needs: food, water, rest, etc, and you’ll need to keep those topped up to keep the settlement running properly. Thankfully colonists are smart little critters and will tend to their own needs when required without manual intervention (except in the weird buggy edge cases where one of my fishing dock settlers somehow keeps grabbing a bottle of booze and then phasing through the floor and getting stuck on the bottom of the ocean.
So now that you’ve got survival sorted and some extra hands (and maybe wings) to help with keeping the settlement running, the next step is expansion. Research and build new stuff until eventually you’re able to get off this planet, or colonise it, I’ll be honest I’m still in the mid-late game and haven’t actually finished it, so I’m not fully sure what the end goal is.
Havendock has been less of a survival adventure story game, and more like a life sim to me similar to Stardew Valley, where the objective is to just do stuff and I’m sure an objective will rear it’s head eventually.
Building complicated chains of food to keep colony hope up on the docks whilst doing crazy machine automation on the seafloor, managing power and polution whilst making sure you don’t run out of sugar or cotton. It’s all a fun little challenge, and I do feel like there is at least always something to work towards, and you’re never just sat idling, at least in my experience…
I do have to admit though, I gave this game a shot beacuse it was on Humble Choice in June 2025. I can definitely recommend it in that specific case, but I’d honestly wait for a pretty deep discount if you’re buying it specifically. The game has some hints as to potentially having coop functionality, but unfortunately this was removed a few months ago, which is a shame. But for what I got out of the game, I don’t regret my time with it. If that’s offputting to you though, go check out Raft for coop ocean building tomfoolery or My Time At Sandrock for the cozy life sim style.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2020710 £16.75 (please wait for a sale)
Humble Choice: https://www.humblebundle.com/membership/june-2025/havendock (Not available on the store, so this only works if you were subscribed in June.)
Leave a Reply