Scavland has been dubbed a ‘love letter’ to games like STALKER, Escape from Tarkov, Tibia, and Metro, and if you’re any kind of a post-apocalyptic gamer like I am, you’ll know how enticing that sounds. What’s more exciting is that NoShadow, the team developing Scavland, a top-down survival RPG, has just announced the game’s early access release date.
On September 4, Scavland will enter early access exclusively on Steam after six years of development. In that time, the team piecing the game together has more than quadrupled in size, and the game’s potential has expanded in kind.
Scavland Challenges You To Survive The Ultimate Wasteland
Scavland is a charming but exceedingly lethal post-apocalyptic survival shooter with a few twists. It’s a top-down, pixel-art title with a hardcore streak running clean through it, boasting hostile mutants, bloodthirsty raiders, and all the trapping of an irradiated, ruined wasteland.
The game’s blurb speaks volumes:
Scavland is a hardcore survival RPG set in Zalesye, a land ravaged by war and the mysterious Mist.
You are a Vulture – a scavenger surviving on what the old world left behind. Explore abandoned settlements, take dangerous jobs, fight mutants and hostile survivors, and slowly build the equipment and reputation you need to push deeper into the wastes.
In Scavland, you’ll be challenged not just to survive, but to explore, building relationships with factions, undertaking scores of quests, and amassing your supplies, all while combating the hazards of the wasteland around you.
The game features underground bunkers and procedurally generated ‘dungeons’, and the further you go from home, the more dangerous the world becomes.
It gets better, as Scavland has already been built with accessibility in mind, so you can play this game using a controller or Steam Deck.
When I heard that Tibia had inspired Scavland, I immediately started tingling. I’ve been playing Tibia for more than 20 years, and it’s one of the world’s oldest active MMORPGs. It too is a top-down, pixel-art title, but it’s rooted in fantasy and magic. I pinged the developers to let them know how much this tidbit had excited me, and they said:
Oh yeah, Tibia was my childhood, and the reason I started doing pixel art 16 years ago. I just wanted to add a custom sword to a modded server as a kid, and somehow that became my first step into game dev. So you’ll recognize traces of it everywhere haha.
It’s worth stressing that Scavland is entirely built around a PvE experience, which is good news for some, and not so much for others. For me, it’s brilliant news. This will easily be one of those games I spend hours on when travelling or killing time on the couch.
You can wishlist Scavland now on Steam, nice and ready for the early access release on September 4. Let us know on the Insider Gaming Discord server if you’ll be playing.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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