Core Keeper Tunnels Onto PlayStation Plus Just Before Its Next Major Update
Who knew living underground could be so cozy?
There are plenty of base-building survival games worth checking out, but sometimes the freedom to explore they offer can make it feel a little too hard to even decide what to do next. This month, one of the best survival games of recent years comes to PlayStation Plus, with a unique underground ground that adds some much-needed structure to its open-world exploration.
After spending some time in Steam Early Access, Core Keeper launched in 1.0 in August 2024. At the time, it was already one of the best base-building games around. It starts with your character (or characters, if you’re playing its great co-op mode) being transported to a sprawling subterranean world with no way back to the surface. From there, you need to dig your way through the walls of the cavern to make any progress, finding treasures abound and exploring a series of biomes each capped with a boss to solve the mysteries of the underground.
Boss battles add challenging goals to aim for in Core Keeper.
Core Keeper was well worth playing back then, and it’s only gotten more exciting in the meantime. In the year and a half since its official release, Core Keeper developer Pugstorm has refined just about every aspect of the game through regular patches, with a series of major updates adding even more to the experience. New biomes and bosses have come since launch, along with pets to help you in combat, a much-improved inventory system, explosive weapons, and seasonal events.
As good as all those updates have been, they wouldn’t mean much if the game they’re adding onto wasn’t already fun to play. Fortunately Core Keeper is one of the best examples of its genre. There are no clear paths in Core Keeper; everywhere you go, you have to find the way there by tunneling through stone. Dotted around the caverns are clearings of fertile ground, ancient ruins, and other surprises, often hiding enemies or even a few friendly creatures. Each time you stumble upon one, it feels like a genuine discovery, since you can only uncover them by picking a direction and following your instincts.
In some games, that kind of freedom can end up feeling aimless, but Core Keeper does a great job of structuring that openness. At the very start of your adventure, you find a shrine waiting for you to return some unknown object to it, giving you a mysterious goal to shoot for from the beginning. Explore long enough and you’ll start to run into bosses, each holding items that are key to your further exploration. You probably won’t be able to take them out when you first encounter them, so they serve as both a clear indication of how to make progress and a specific challenge for you to build your character toward.
Despite being underground, there’s plenty of room for running a farm in Core Keeper.
The sense of character progression is also excellent in Core Keeper. While you start with crude wooden equipment, it doesn’t take long to start uncovering better materials and stronger gear. There’s a surprising amount of variety in how you build your character from there, with weapons that let you focus on melee, ranged, or magic damage, or even summon minions to do the fighting for you. A single new piece of equipment can totally change the way you play and tracking down full gear sets is yet another challenge to orient yourself toward.
Not long after Core Keeper’s PS Plus debut, it’s slated to receive yet another major update. Dubbed Void and Voltage, the update adds some wild new gear including a flamethrower, plus new mechanical monsters and a spooky new biome beyond the edges of the current map. That makes it a great time to check out Core Keeper if you haven’t already and start building your subterranean home in preparation for the new challenges to come.
