Ah, sweet Alaska. Internationally renowned for its dangerously stupid hockey mums and Werner Herzog documentaries. It’s also the setting of top-down survival game The Wild Eight which has now sauntered into early access. I’ve only played a couple of hours so far but it is enough to know that surviving in Alaska is tough. Right from the moment you wake (amid flaming plane wreckage) you need to get busy hunting or get busy dying. I have died many many times. I don’t know how those hockey mums do it. If you’ve played Don’t Starve you’ll be familiar with the basic idea. You’re in a harsh world and you’ve got to gather wood, ore, meat, mushrooms, bones, fur and so on. Keep gathering and hunting, upgrading your little tent and workshop to build more things to help you survive for longer. But here you’ve also got up to seven other pals doing the same thing. They all have different strengths (some make better medicine, some make more reliable tools) and the idea is that teamwork pays off. You can build little boxes to share things with the group, or save your friend’s life by throwing some mushrooms in the snow and hastily typing “eat dat m8”.