Drill down into a lot of sci-fi and you get to a handful of hero archetypes. Among the most memorable are the gung-ho marine, the loyal alien warrior and the resourceful scientist. The former solves problems with actions rather than words, while the latter uses tools, empathy and academics. Honeycomb: The World Beyond puts you squarely in the role of the scientist archetype on an alien, new world.
In Honeycomb: The World Beyond you take on the role of a scientist that has been tasked with exploring a newly discovered, lush planet. The reason behind your cataloguing is simple: Earth is now almost entirely barren, and your team is hoping to map out the ecology of this new world in an attempt to restart nature on Earth.
In a post No Man’s Sky world, creating a large open-world game — specifically, one that works through a combination of exploration and crafting — is always going to be a little tricky. Where Honeycomb excels is in breaking down the multi-tool that we so commonly see in science fiction games into individual tools. By bringing back tools that each have their own set purposes it gives a really satisfying ‘identify and interact’ loop that’s often lost in other games. Equipping your tools like chisels, secateurs etc, makes the interaction feel more deliberate, and actually made me feel like a vector for the character’s knowledge.
In your mission to be able to fully identify the workings of the new world you’ll have to not only extract samples but also replicate (or emulate) plants and other parts of the world. Once you’ve done that, and started to learn how the foundations of its ecosystem works, you can start combining and manufacturing other items, such as food for feeding animals, which then opens up more options. Herein comes the survival element of Honeycomb: The World Beyond, although it feels more like a solo version of ARK or Rust — with building a base and taming the world — than other games that take on the genre.
I was lucky enough to sit down with an early build of it while at Gamescom earlier on in the year, and really enjoyed what I played. The earliest, tutorial parts did feel a little bit rough around the edge, but the exploration, pacing and inventory system all felt incredibly well thought-out. I didn’t get to explore late game mechanics, such as genetic splicing, but really enjoyed the ‘not so alien’ nature of its world and how easy to parse the world information was being exhibited.
Honeycomb: The World Beyond is expected to launch for Windows and Mac in early 2026.
