Colony 37 Is the Ultimate Underground Money Pit You Can’t Escape

Hello everyone. So here we are again, faced with another sandbox survival darling entering the overcrowded coliseum of Early Access. This time it’s Colony 37, a game that quite literally wants you to dig yourself into a hole-both figuratively with your money and literally with your pickaxe. Scheduled for release on August 26, 2025, this shiny little gem promises procedural generation, survival mechanics, a “core” story, and of course, the ever-exciting opportunity to run out of oxygen while buried under tons of virtual rock. Thrilling. Or suffocating. Take your pick.

The Early Access Reality Check

The developer freely admits that they’re flying this starship mostly solo, with “a couple of friends” as backup. Which always fills me with confidence, doesn’t it? Because surely, when we think about polished, feature-complete games, we think of guys in their bedrooms with pickaxes in their dreams. But hey, at least they’re honest enough to say it’s incomplete and will live in Early Access limbo for an uncertain amount of time.

They reckon it’ll only take “2–4 months” to move from this unfinished state to a complete release. Two to four months. That’s hilarious. In gaming dev terms, that’s the equivalent of saying you’re just popping to the shop for milk and returning with a newly colonized Mars base a decade later. We’ve seen this movie before, folks-it’s called “Forever Early Access,” and it stars every other indie developer who swore they’d stick to a roadmap.

The Feature Wishlist – Santa Better Show Up

• Story mode, challenge mode, and hardcore mode – because one way to dress the same pig is to put three different hats on it.
• A completed storyline – translation: the current placeholder story could be written on a napkin.
• A high score system – we’re back in the arcade, folks. Don’t forget your quarters.
• An infinite world – because finite worlds are so passé.
• A host of enemy creatures wandering about underground – basically the “mobile hazards” checkbox from the game design starter pack.

It all sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Except let’s not forget: right now, none of that exists in a meaningful state. At present, you’ve got seven underground biomes, 30 trinkets (all with “upsides and downsides”-translation: balancing headaches), some suspiciously vague storyline bits, and the kind of procedural generation seen in dozens of other mining-survival-alike titles.

Gameplay: Dig, Loot, Oxygenate, Repeat

So what does Colony 37 want from you? Simple. Grab your drill, your rusty pickaxe, maybe toss in a few explosives for good measure, and start carving your way through the earth. Gather resources, sell them, buy trinkets, rinse, repeat. A glorified loop that, let’s be brutally honest here, is the same treadmill-digging experience you’ve seen in games like Terraria and Deep Rock Galactic, except less dwarves yelling “Rock and stone!” and more solitary suffocation checks with your oxygen meter. It’s not mining for the glory of your fantasy kingdom; it’s mining for corporate overlords. Hooray for capitalism, even underground.

Yes, there are different instruments, biomes, and oh-so-special radioactive hazards-which frankly sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen if OSHA ever existed in space. But the real question is whether this loop can sustain player interest. Because right now? It looks like it could get stale faster than week-old bread left in the sun.

Developer Promises vs. History Lessons

Let’s talk about community involvement. Apparently, feedback will be “thoroughly investigated,” which sounds suspiciously like corporate-speak for, “we’ll read your posts and then ignore them while building whatever we feel like.” And here’s a fun conspiracy theory nugget for you: every Early Access dev says the exact same thing. It’s like they all bought the same “How to Launch on Steam Early Access” eBook from 2014. Spoiler alert: the chapter about actually finishing the game is always left on the cutting room floor.

The System Requirements – Modest Demands

The system requirements are, frankly, one of the few things that make sense. A GTX 950 or Radeon 7970? That’s practically prehistoric by gaming standards. If you can run League of Legends and tolerate its player base, you can run this. Just don’t expect ultra settings on your five-year-old potato netbook, because as much as the dev tries boasting about optimization options, this isn’t magic fairy powder-it’s a mining sim written by one guy and a couple pals.

The Big Question: Is This Worth It?

Now here comes the critical question: should you throw money into this subterranean venture when it inevitably launches? Honestly, if you like digging for the sake of digging, managing your oxygen meters like a medically-obsessed anesthesiologist (yes, I know the irony), and convincing yourself that trinkets with downsides are “meaningful choices,” then maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a kick out of it.

But for the rest of us? This smells like déjà vu. A straightforward mining-and-survival loop wrapped in Early Access uncertainty, sprinkled generously with promises about endless worlds, storylines, and big scary monsters that may or may not ever actually exist. And when the dev says they won’t increase the price after 1.0 release, I can’t help but laugh. Not raising the price means they already know what this is worth: not a penny more than launch day, no matter how many features they supposedly cram in.

The Verdict

Colony 37 likes to present itself as a new frontier in survival mining games, but right now, it feels like same-old-dirt wrapped in a shiny bow. Sure, the potential is there-procedural worlds, hidden laboratories, trinket combinations-but potential is the most worthless currency in Early Access. Everyone has it, few cash it in. Unless this developer seriously shocks us with a fully realized, polished, and genuinely compelling iteration down the line, I’m not holding my breath (because, let’s be honest, you’ll need that oxygen for the game itself).

Verdict: For now, color me skeptical. Keep it on your wishlist if you’re desperate for more mining survival loops. Otherwise, wait and see if this particular excavation uncovers treasure or just another landfill of abandoned ambition.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Article Source: Colony 37