Sandwalkers Review – A Slow Walk Through a Harsh World

In Sandwalkers we have a caravan to look after, a hostile world to explore and plenty of things that can go wrong along the way. There were times where it felt like we’re making progress. Most of the times, however, we played the long game and tried to be a little more patient than we would like.

A Slow Journey

Sandwalkers is all about exploring. Moving around a procedurally generated map, we discover locations, collect resources, meet other groups and get into turn-based fights.

There is a lot to think about before commiting to the adventure. We have to consider our supplies, our caravan and what might be waiting for us further ahead. The weather also plays a role, with storms, heat waves and acid rain affecting our journeys. The game doesn’t always make us feel powerful, either. There were plenty of moments when we wondered whether pushing forward was actually worth the risk.

Combat is turn-based and takes place on a small tactical grid. You build a team of characters from different classes who can manipulate environmental conditions, or who interacts with ancient technology.

Battles revolve around positioning, shield management, and elemental status effects. Environmental hazards like heat waves and acid rain directly affect combat, allowing you to use the weather against enemies or forcing you to play defensively when conditions turn against you.

It is, by all accounts, an unusual game that requires adaptation to its gameplay mechanics. It’s not a game for everyone and it’ll either click with you or it won’t.

We usually enjoy games that let us jump in, get a feel for the systems and see our progress fairly quickly. Sandwalkers asks for more patience. Its appeal comes from learning the systems, making better decisions on later expeditions and carrying knowledge from one caravan to another.

When a caravan inevitably fails, you send memory seeds back to the Mother Tree. This meta-progression system carries over your knowledge to future expeditions.

The memories you return convert into permanent unlocks, including new character classes, starting supplies, and passive upgrades for future runs. While a single wipe means losing your active squad and their immediate gear, the overall map progress and unlocked shortcuts remain.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with what Sandwalkers is trying to do. The different characters have their own abilities, exploration and combat work together, and losing a caravan doesn’t mean that everything you’ve done disappears. The game is built around learning from each expedition and using that knowledge on the next one.

But we never quite reached the point where all of those systems became something we wanted to keep playing for hours. The PS5 version does make the game easier to play from the sofa. The interface has been reworked for consoles, and controller support is built in, which is important for a game with this many menus, choices and things to keep track of. The pixel art also gives the game plenty of character, especially when we start meeting the strange creatures and people living in this world.

A Matter of Taste

Sandwalkers is a difficult game for us to review in greater depth because we can see what it is doing well without necessarily wanting to spend another evening playing it.

Its combination of exploration, turn-based combat, resource management and roguelike progression will appeal to players who enjoy taking their time and learning from failed expeditions. For us, the slower pace and the amount of planning required made it harder to get attached to the journey.

That doesn’t make Sandwalkers a bad game, far from it. It simply made us realise that this particular kind of expedition isn’t really our thing. Tell us in the comments below if it’s yours!