Introduction

Smalland is a dwarf adventure survival game developed by Merge Games. The game was released as early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on March 29, 2023. 　Smalland is a time-stealing work in which you operate a small character, explore the world from a perspective that you cannot experience in everyday life, collect materials, craft, and survive.
Since it supports Japanese, you can say that even a Japanese-only person like me can play with confidence. In this article, I, as a survival game amateur, will introduce my impressions of the early stages of the game and the game system.

A few minutes into the game, you’ll be immersed in a fantasy-filled world filled with dwarves and insects. Although the purpose of the story is to embark on a journey to find a way to cure the princess’s illness, this work leaves no doubt that time will melt through exploration, gathering, and crafting.

This game has a cycle of day and night, weather changes such as storms, snow, and rain, and temperature changes, and my frank opinion is that it is a time-stealing work that combines survival elements to survive in harsh environments.

Flow until the start of the game

It’s just personal freedom, so please accept it for reference. “My recommended procedure is as follows.”

In settings, there are general, graphics, and input items as shown in the image below. You can check and configure the keyboard and controller operations by mapping the input items.

As I noticed when I actually played it, I was confused because some of the operation methods were not described. To give an example of controller operation, the following two points are the operation methods that I was able to discover on my own.

Characters are optional. “You can choose from the prepared patterns and finish it to your liking.” “I’m sure there are people who would like to create more details, but this was enough for me.”

The degree of difficulty is determined by the item Beast Full Mode on the screen below that appears next to the characters. “By activating this beastful mode, insects will not attack unless you attack from here.” “I thought it would be better to disable it after having a certain amount of powerful equipment.”

I’m new to this type of game, so I’m not confident, but I think that the world will be relevant when playing online. “Is it like creating it for offline play and using it for online play that may come later? (sweat)

This screen will appear every time you start playing, so don’t make a mistake in the settings.

Craft tools early

The basic tools should be crafted as soon as the materials are collected. Using the craft on the menu screen, create wood hatchets, builder’s hammers, and torches and set them in slots.

There are 8 slots, so let’s set frequently used tools and food.

the act of eating food

As I mentioned earlier, I had to restart because I didn’t know how to eat food. “It may be a normal operation in survival games, but I could select the items set in the slots, but I couldn’t use them.”
The answer was “Press up on the cross key”.

Armor and weapons are set directly in the green frame.