Here’s some Mayday Steam Deck news for anyone who likes their survival games on the cozier side. Mayday: The Survival Island is out now on Steam, and it’s a hand-drawn open-world survival game that’s as much about building a home as it is about staying alive. It comes from Pequi Studios, a three-person team in Goiânia, Brazil, and it’s published by indie.io.
You wake up alone on a strange island after a mysterious crash, and from there it’s up to you how things unfold. You hunt, fish, farm and craft, slowly turning a shelter into a proper homestead, and then head out across a whole archipelago to work out why you ended up there in the first place.
24 hand-made islands to explore
The world is made up of 24 islands, and none of them are procedurally generated. Each one has been built by hand, with its own environments, resources and dangers, from misty swamps and sun-bleached beaches to old cemeteries and forgotten ruins. There’s treasure to find and tools to upgrade as you learn how to deal with each island.
There’s also a mystery running underneath it all. Carved symbols, magical totems and sealed ruins hint at a lost civilisation and a bigger story, and the deeper you explore, the more of it you piece together. Importantly, nothing forces you down a set path. There are no gated objectives, so you can spend hours on your base, or set off after the story whenever you feel like it.
Survival, farming and a Comfort system
The survival side covers a lot of ground. You can hunt, fish, gather and farm, herd sheep, deal with buffalo, cook, brew potions and unlock crafting stations one after another as your base grows. Combat is there too, but the developers say it’s optional, which is a nice touch if you’d rather spend your time tending crops than fighting.
The part that caught my eye is the Comfort system. You get a hammer build menu for placing walls, doors, floors and furniture, and every piece you add raises your Comfort level. That isn’t just for show: higher Comfort gives you survival bonuses, such as more health or slower energy drain. It’s a neat way to reward decorating, and it fits the idea of building a home rather than just a shelter.
The team also playtested the game with local game development students, and the hand-drawn art hides a few pop-culture nods, along with characters modelled on the developers themselves.
Mayday Steam Deck news: how it should run
On paper, this looks like a good match for the Steam Deck. Steam lists full controller support, the pixel art style isn’t demanding, and the minimum PC specs are very light: a Core 2 Duo E6400, 6GB of RAM, a 1GB GeForce GTX 460 or Radeon R7 240, and just 500MB of storage.
There are two caveats, though. The game is Windows-only, so on the Deck it will run through Proton rather than natively, and Valve hasn’t rated it for Steam Deck, Steam Machine or Steam Frame yet. Until that happens, I can’t tell you how well it actually runs on the handheld. It isn’t a VR game, so on the Steam Frame it would be a flat-screen game too.
It also supports Steam Achievements (54 of them) and Steam Cloud, which is handy if you want to move between the Deck and a desktop PC. If cozy survival with a bit of mystery sounds like your thing, I’ve also covered Littlelands and the pixel-art farming adventure Emberville, and if you’d rather go bigger, Enshrouded runs great on the Steam Deck.
Price, launch discount and player numbers
Mayday: The Survival Island is £11.19 on Steam in the UK, or $13.99 in the US, but there’s a 20% introductory discount running until 16 November, which brings it down to £8.95 ($11.19). It’s also available on Instant Gaming, as well as on indie.io’s own store.
When I checked on the evening of launch day, there were 232 people playing the full game on Steam, and another 117 in the free demo, which is still available. There aren’t any user reviews on Steam yet, so it’s too early to say how players are finding it.
I’ll keep an eye out for a Steam Deck rating from Valve. In the meantime, the demo is the easiest way to see how it feels on your own Deck before you buy.
