The Survival Genre is certainly one of the most densely populated spaces in games these days.

It’s not just the likes of Rust and Fallout 76 now, we’ve got the likes of Subnautica 2 coming up, as well as games like Valheim and Grounded, and even Dune Awakening. But here’s one that may not be on your radar.

Soulmask has recently entered into 1.0 and alongside it, they’ve launched an Egyptian styled expansion called Shifting Sands. And it’s damn good!

For folks who’ve already played a ton in Early Access, this expansion adds a wealth of content, almost like an entirely new game with this Egyptian themed open world, as well as the option to build a city in the sky and even use new god-like powers!

But for those new to it, Soulmask essentially lets you build and rear a tribe. So that could be finding ways to use their unique skills, setting them off on risky jobs, and even setting up automated production chains. You’ll also need to think about things like nearby resources, is there a good river flow nearby? What minerals are close? Can you hunt effectively?

All this is made easier by getting more tribesman, of course, and that comes with you building out a reputation, but also sometimes by force and even by coercing by using your Soul Mask, depending on the strategies you’ll be adopting.

With the mask, you can wield massive god-like abilities which give you a real fighting chance in clutch situations. Of which you’ll find yourself in many! As the Last One, you are bestowed the mask as a gift and it’s up to you how you use it, but you feel like someone is always watching.

As a game, Soulmask really does offer the player a great amount of variety, and as you get deeper into the game you can take on invasions with full-scale PVP mode, take on legendary bosses, and in true Survival fashion, of course, build out a home and hideout for your group.

For the purposes of this piece though, I want to spend more time on the new Shifting Sands content, as that’s largely where I spent my time. And as someone who grew up digesting lots of info on Egyptian and Greek Gods, this was a treat. And the game certainly doesn’t hold back in the violence department, with blood splattering everywhere and even some fatalities as you take down your foes and monsters. It’s pretty grisly!

Right off the bat, the visuals just blew me away. The scale of pyramid like structures, shifting sands, but also just the size of the map, and all the little hidden areas you can find. It’s absolutely glorious!

In Survival Games as always, you start pretty bare and are struggling to get around, liable to get yourself killed pretty sharp, but before long you’re wielding powerful abilities, fighting beings three times the size of you. And pulling in enemies Scorpion style with a spear! Lovely!

Further still, you’ll need to make sure you’re regularly well stocked up with water, bandages and food, to stave off starvation and hunger. And you don’t fall prey to the environmental challenges. Though that can also come in the forms of ever changing weather effects, like brutal sand storms that completely impair your vision and mobility. And they happen more often than you think.

You also get to fly around the map, gliding around on glorious golden wings and it just feel sooo satisfying and freeing, especially since you just get to swoop down ala Batman and investigate things at any point. It just works!

But it’s the game’s mines and dungeons, filled with some ferocious foes. Usually, you’ll need to be a bit careful about stepping in as foes range in difficulty, just like you’ll find in classic MMOs. But as with anything, defeating enemies can give you new gear types to help your competency in battle and make your task a lot easier.

Venturing in the dungeons can throw up all sorts of fun rewards and challenges, and this to me is where the game really excelled as between the variety of environments and being able to test your skills with some delicious loot waiting on the other side, it’s a great way to see more of what Shifting Sands and Soulmask has to offer.

That said, this is also a game where you create your own fun and stories and that can be something as simple as taking on rival tribes who are growing and emerging nearby and you want to assert your dominace. You can set out on full scale war to bring them down and acquire the land – and even the people – for yourself . I can well imagine this will be a great lure for playing with friends as you try to work out the best strategies for infiltration and maximise your combat efficiences.

This is actually a quick way to build your dominance, but of course you need to make sure you’ve got enough support and you need to be sure that you can comfortably take on that challenge. Or die trying.

Weapon variety is really satisfying too with bows feeling effective at range as well as the hard-hitting close up weapons that really smash and grab, especially as you grind through levels and build up on experience. And when you are facing down creatures, being able to hack at them and gain lots of loot, like skins and even rare keys!

And earning this experience is eventually fed into your mask and future masks you may want to equip and acquire. Yep, that’s right, you’ll actually be able to switch masks and these vary in style and what they offer, whether you want more competency in combat or even focus on attributes that give benefits to stealth. Masks are gradually powered up over the course of the game using green crystals and sunstones and as you gather them, they can be spent in a number of ways across the masks three distinct pathways.

And when you visit certain yellow areas, you can even gather unique features for your mask, usually protected behind defeating one of the game’s bosses.

Soulmask and Shifting Sands just offer this vast playgrond for potential and there is a lot of content to find and uncover now. The map is huge, and quite satisfying as you remove the veil of fog that covers it through exploration. There’s definitely some jank here and the game isn’t flawless with some performance dips, some issues with the follower system where they don’t always listen to your commands and honestly the tutorial isn’t the clearest. You do need to do a fair bit of reading around and invest a fair bit of time to get a good understanding.

But those into Survival games will probably find that comes easily to them anyway and isn’t so much of issue, but those who aren’t as familiar, these games can be quite all-consuming and so picking the right one is really important. For the Egyptian setting, though, I had a great time battling epic monsters, leading my tribe to victory and even finding updates to the mask to see where they would lead.

I would highly recomend Soulmask and its Shifting Sands expansion if you’ve ever had a passing interest in Egyptian lore, and you want a game that can really consume your focus for a little while. It’s great and I hope to see much more from the developers in future.