Ark of Charon review: As frustrating as fighting climate change

An interesting take on colony sims with significant drawbacks

Angoo / Sunsoft

Time is a circle, the end of the world has come and gone, and a new beginning is upon us – but before new civilizations and cultures can thrive on this planet, a new world tree must be planted. Ark of Charon’s premise is that you are the guardian of said sapling: You must nourish, protect, and move it to its final destination in this combination of colony sim and tower defense with a bit of a roguelike twist.

You never stick around in one place for too long in Ark of Charon, being driven before a storm of darkness that hopes to consume the world tree sapling before it can reach its intended spot, so you build your base on the back of the moving plant, which is basically a four-legged Ent. Like in games such as Faster Than Light, you choose which nodes of the map to move towards, having to weigh the amount of resistance you may encounter with the resources present in the biome.

Since you’re essentially a nomad, you extract whatever resources you can during your stops to upgrade your base and stockpile goods you’ll need for producing food, ammunition, and so on. Naturally, one of the game’s great challenges is resource management and choosing the correct path for your world tree. You may not always need to visit a lush biome that can support growing food, if you’re well-stocked anyway. If you can last for one or two nodes, it may be more worth it to check out destitute wastelands, which may harbor forgotten relics and precious ores.

That directly brings us to the game’s second great challenge: A lack of space. Your sapling’s back is only so long, forcing you to build upwards and, eventually, construct precarious-looking balconies to meet all of your storage, production, and defense needs. This system is underlined by a load mechanic, so you can’t freely build a wacky fortress like in Minecraft – it’s more like the building system in Valheim (though not quite as punishing), where stuff needs proper support.

This is a cool concept and it’s very satisfying to see your base on the world tree grow, slowly changing it to a walking citadel. However, it also brings out some of the game’s shortcomings.

Though you can build platforms and balconies in a pretty free manner using blocks, buildings come in predetermined shapes and sizes. While upgrading buildings of the same type to be constructed with sturdier materials is pretty simple – your workers will replace it one for one without an issue – rearranging your base is a bit of a pain. If you made one mistake early on regarding the placement of a building on the foundation layer of your base, you’ll basically be screwed – demolishing it will make your base come down like a house of cards.

Problematically, the UI of the game – in contrast to its absolutely gorgeous art style – is not very intuitive and increases the chance of placing things in a wrong way or making other mistakes. Half the time, it feels like you’re fighting the controls more than the enemies trying to stop the tree and that’s a really bad sign for a title that’s set in a pretty uncomplicated 2D environment.

Ark of Charon's tech tree feels like a trap to confuse players. / Angoo / Sunsoft

That need to manage your space really cuts the amount of freedom you have while building your base, because you’ll quickly realize that there is only one way to do it without dooming your run – and this illusion of choice, this need to min-max to actually have a chance at winning, is present in the tech tree as well.

It will give you lots of choices, but many of them are completely useless without first picking up several nodes in a different part of the tech tree. Why even provide those options? It’s an easy way for the player to get confused and destroy their run without any apparent benefit.

Many of the core features aren’t super obvious either, such as the fact that you can combine the different souls you pick up by defeating enemies to specialize your newly-made golems. Building a manual drill seems like a good idea to get iron ore quicker, right? Nope, it can only extract more high-level minerals, but the game doesn’t tell you that and I had to search the internet to find out why my golems simply would refuse to use it – there are many onboarding and quality-of-life improvements that would make this game better. Then there is the issue of bugs. At launch, one bug essentially made the game unplayable because defense buildings would use up all of their ammunition in one shot. This has been fixed now, fortunately, but it’s not the only problem impacting gameplay.

Later in the game, you can create all sorts of high-tech weaponry. / Angoo / Sunsoft

Between the stops in which you extract resources and have time to build up your base, you get the combat sequences as your world tree moves between nodes. Strange creatures will come and attack you en route, testing your defenses – so always make sure you have enough towers and ammunition prepared. Having an efficient base layout is rewarded in combat, as it will help your defense structures hit their targets and make supplying them with new ammunition easier. Generally, though, you are doomed to watch the action and can’t actively assist your golems.

Aside from the normal game mode, there is an endless roguelike mode allowing you to pick resources and bonuses as you advance through combats, but due to the design aspects I mentioned above – the limited freedom due to lack of space and tech requirements – this isn’t as much of a boon to replayability as you’d think.

I really enjoyed Ark of Charon’s concept and love the art style of the game, but its lack of polish in terms of onboarding, user interface, and general quality-of-life features make its brutal difficulty a frustrating experience rather than a rewarding one. Protecting this tree is just as tough as fighting climate change and in many ways this 1.0 release does not feel like it brought the game out of Early Access.

Score: 6/10

Platform tested: PC (Steam)