Brunante Is a Quiet Survival Game about Being Home Before the Last Light After the Sun Goes Down

Brunante is a survival game which, in contrast, is quite chill. You wake up on a shore with a knife and absolutely nothing else. No tutorial popping up to tell you where to go, no glowing objective marker, no friendly NPC explaining the crafting system.

So, you just start picking things up, figure out what you can do with them, put together somewhere to sleep, and make that place feel like home. Ain’t no other way to do it all. Your little shelter can eventually turn into a hut, cabin, turf house, or even a hall long enough to keep four animals at one end. There are ten different kinds of shelter in total.

You can approach Brunante like a survival game you want to grind through, or you can mostly wander around, sit in the woods and enjoy the place. According to the developer, both are valid ways to play it.

The world is made up of sixteen million tiles, generated as you walk into it. It has rivers you can wade through, deep caves, abandoned villages, wrecks, and a watchtower that lets you chart the surrounding country for miles. There’s also a quarry that’s useless until you’ve made yourself a pick.

You can fish sixteen different species, pull relics out of the lake using a magnet, hunt, cook, farm, tan hide, fire brick and burn charcoal. You can also tame one animal (mind you: just one!). And you can also plant a garden that grows according to the real calendar, build roads out of cairns and then use those roads to travel around.

Brunante has four seasons, and they affect what grows, what bites, and what you can catch. Broadleaf trees turn gold and eventually lose their leaves while the spruce stays green. Sheltered shallows freeze while the rivers don’t. Winter even takes the ponds away and leaves you with the ground that used to be underneath them.

Do you know what Brunante means?

It’s a Québec French word for the low, uncertain light right after the sun disappears, before proper darkness arrives. Basically, that last bit of daylight. The entire game is written in Québec French. So, you’ll get terms like la brunante, la corde de bois, la cabane à sucre, le collet and la carriole.

Brunante is available on the Google Play Store for $4.99. There are no ads, no in-app purchases, and you don’t need internet to play it. The whole game is just one HTML file with three difficulty modes. There’s also a free demo that only covers one day and one night.

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