Embark on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
Inspired by the deep simulation of Dwarf Fortress, the open world survival of Minecraft, and the social interactions of The Sims. Embark is a colony management game with a focus on complex simulation in a huge living 3D world.
Embark is a colony sim, base-building and strategy game
developed and published by Overly Complicated Games.
Released on April 18th 2019 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 379 reviews of which 238 were positive and 141 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.1 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 24.50€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Embark into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows® 7, 64-bit
- Processor: Intel CPU Core i3-530 2.93 GHz, AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2GB DirectX 11 GPU (Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660, AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870)
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- Additional Notes: If you have issues with lower spec GPUs on world generation, change "World Generation Quality" in the options menu to Low.
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Possibly a gem, definitely a pleasant blend of Rimworld, The Sims, Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress.
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Right when you dive in it feels like rimworld with better graphics and building mechanics. Aside from that things you can build and craft are much more limited and pretty much expect only core mechanics. -Some buildings like the saltwater purifier do not work -Job priorities are broken and half the time your guys choose not to prioritize -pathing is CONSTANTLY breaking requiring you to destroy and remake crafting stations and tasks or use military control to force path -animal husbandry does not work and has been broken for months Also this game is not at all optimized, I have stopped playing because it has gotten so laggy its no longer enjoyable watching all my workers space walk and skip around on the screen. Computer Specs i7-7820hk 64GB Ram Nvidia Geforce 1080
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Ive felt the need to recommend this game to people for a little while now, it might help people on the fence about trying it out or at least follow it. Im not a pro reviewer so im sorry if this is long winded or all over the place. It plays similarly to a 3D rimworld or to a lesser extent dwarf fortress. I say lesser since its not ASCII and the UI isnt as much of a learning process to use but has z-levels. It also reminds me a bit of Oxygen Not Included. And it doesnt seem like you can take prisoners and harvest their organs (yet). It still has some ways to go at this point, but is also very stable right now and does very well with the basebuilding aspects. Colonists still need a bit of work and their jobs will sometimes hit annoying snags it feels like. Like you designate some trees to cut down and as they make their way to the trees while its cold out they give up halfway and run back to base to warm up, stand inside for 5 seconds til warm enough and go out again, but make it less of the way to the trees than last time. So they are constantly bouncing back and forth between temperatures, getting nothing done, getting pissed off at life, and quickly lowering the temperature in the room they keep entering and exiting, slowly cooling the rest of the base to lethal temperatures. Winter season is also the AFK season, since they cant stand being outside and so spend most of their days wandering or complaining about cold temperatures. Temperature regulation is a bit wonky at this time too, not a big deal in areas where it never gets below freezing or too hot. But i really only play boreal biomes, and I like to have seasons, with a reason to make clothing. The issue being whenever walls are replaced or rock mined it resets the temperature for the rooms connected to the wall. So an underground pair of bedrooms sitting at a good 70f will suddenly drop to -12f after one block is removed or replaced, even though theres no outside access, and the rooms themselves are 6 z-levels or more below the surface. These arent game breaking issues in my opinion and can be fixed with some creative thinking, but still gets quite annoying after a bit. Personally i find the colonists a bit ugly aswell. Makes it hard to feel for them when they get swarmed by giant flies since they kinda look like bug people themselves. Also their equipment will bug out regularly too, their portraits will show the gear equipped, but the character themselves will still be running around in a wife beater and boxers. They still get the benefits of clothing though so its really just a minor thing. Weapons are tools are shown correctly though. Colonists AI is also a little sub-par at this point, like with leaving the doors open and killing the warm temperatures in a base, they also have no danger avoidance, so they'll run right through a nest of bugs or passed a hungry wolf. They definitely need a bit of baby-sitting at times. The colonists each have traits that give them strengths or weaknesses to available jobs to do. Like a "bold" colonist would make a better fighter due to their higher morale, but not as great a hauler since the trade-off for the bold trait is a slower movespeed iirc. They also form relations based off the compatibility of the traits and can get married and start pumping out kids to grow the colony. Long story short though, the game is fun at this point for a longtime Rimworld and Dwarf Fort player. And fans of Terraira, ONI, and Minecraft can find some stuff to enjoy too. Its not as hardcore a autism simulator as DF but theres still a fair challenge to be had. The devs are pushing out updates rapidly, and every update has been an improvement on the game so far, imho. Which is rare to see for most games these days I feel. Also ive been able to enjoy the game for almost 200 hours, also a bit of a rarity for me. Ill probably update this blog more as the game is developed, or when its released. Since I doubt the gripes I've brought up will last long at all. Thanks for reading. Sorry for my poor English.
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This review is based on version 0.536 My perspective is highly influenced by Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld. Pros: + Ore system. Very similar to what we find in Dwarf Fortress and very "realistic". + Performance. The game shows area much larger than typical embark size in DF or RimWorld, yet it runs in 60fps on my 1050Ti. + Easy to designate digging area, or building walls. I like "replace" option when building walls - I was missing this in RimWorld. There's only one exception: it's very difficult to "dig up". + Surprisingly, very little bugs! I got over 20 hours out of the game and didn't encounter a single game-breaking situation. I had only problems with pipes no being removed with the building but reloading the game helped. + In game tutorials are well made. They don't interfere with what you want to do but just simply suggest things you may do now. There's nothing worse than a tutorial which forces you to place buildings exactly where you don't like them. Cons: - I hate the UI style. It's just terrible. On top of that I find it difficult to find information, especially about stock. It's quicker to open crafting menu to find how much wood I have left, than to try to dig this information from the "Stock" menu. - I don't like the graphics in general. I know that Devs poured their heart and soul into this but sorry, the characters are just ugly. - Enemies look like created in 5 minutes in MS Paint 3D, or downloaded from different packages on Unity Asset Store. Free ones. - While local map is generated very nicely, the World map is shit. Sorry now, it is. - There's this "water situation" which no one wants to talk about. You are going to run out of water. Always. Even if you build desalination plant, you're going to run out of water because there will be so much salt produced, you will have no place to store it. I'd love to have option like a barrel to gather rain water, or maybe water should fill smaller holes like in Dwarf Fortress... There are options. - Very little mechanisms. I blame early version of the game. - The price is rather steep for such early version. I'd suggest something closer to €10. I'm a little bit on a fence here, giving thumbs up as an encouragement for the Devs.
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For an Early Access, its very good. Am very impressed and enjoying playing it lots. Hard to pull myself away from it. Works and looks really good. Start on easy difficulty as there is a bit of learning, and you may lose a few times before you'll learn how to do well and prosper. Definite must have game if you like sim/building types of games. Only had one small crash so far, which was no problem as it autosaves when crashing. Runs well on my i5 cpu and radeon gpu. If having problems with frame rate, lower the graphics (eg. ambient occlusion off and shadows off would help for a start), as the game is very gpu expensive atm. I have an 8 gig radeon R930 or something like that, and still once my castle and population got bigger, I had to tweak some graphic settings. Then it ran like a dream. I recommend this game to anyone that's even half interested in building/sim/management type games. The price is fair, as I know how difficult it is to make this type of game and time consuming as well. Well done to the developers, finally the type of game I've wanted to develop for a long time has arrived. Yay for embark lol. Keep developing it please, adding more content and maybe a few more features to this already would be really good, am happy the way it is now.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 10 April 2025 22:06 |
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| SteamSpy data | 06 April 2025 22:32 |
| Steam price | 12 April 2025 20:47 |
| Steam reviews | 12 April 2025 07:58 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Embark, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Embark
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Embark concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Embark compatibility
Online players
1
Developer
Overly Complicated Games
Publisher
Overly Complicated Games
Release
18 Apr 2019
Platforms