Soulmask 1.0 Everything You Need To Know

What Actually Is Soulmask

Right, so I'm going to cut straight to it. Soulmask is a multiplayer survival sandbox game where you play as the chieftain of a tribe in a primitive world and and this is the bit that matters you're not just one person. You can possess any member of your tribe and play as them. That's the whole thing. That's what makes it different.

Soulmask 1.0 key art - build your tribe, dominate the wilderness.

At first glance it looks like your standard Ark-meets-Conan-Exiles survival game. Ancient civilisation setting, base building, resource gathering, bosses. You've seen this loop before. But the moment you actually start playing, you realise Soulmask is doing something a lot more interesting than the surface suggests.

It launched on Steam Early Access on May 31 2024, developed by Campfire Studio and published by Qooland Games. Nearly a year later it hit 1.0 with over 800,000 players and 80% positive reviews on Steam. For a survival game that flew under the radar, those numbers are seriously impressive. And that's the thing it won the 2024 Nyx Survival Game of the Year award. People who know this genre, know Soulmask.

So yes if you've been sleeping on it, now is the perfect time to wake up, because 1.0 just dropped alongside a massive Egypt DLC. More on that below.

The Mask System The Thing That Makes It Different

Okay, this is the part I actually want to talk about because man the mask system is wild. Your soul is bound to a mysterious mask. That mask is your identity in this world. And through it, you can possess any tribesman you recruit jumping between their bodies, using their specific skills and stats depending on what the situation demands.

Think about what that means in multiplayer. You're not locked to one character and their build. Got a tribesman who's a legendary craftsman? Possess them when you need to build. Got a bloodthirsty warrior with a combat skill you want? Hop in. It's like Palworld's companion system crossed with actual body-swapping mechanics, and it creates a gameplay loop I have not seen in any other survival game.

Each mask also grants you unique divine abilities and combat styles. The base game has a Civilization Mask focused on defence and base building, and a Conquest Mask that leans into stealth and combat. As your mask evolves, you stop being human. You become something approaching a god walking among your tribe.

And here's the thing the mask isn't just a mechanic. In 1.0, Campfire Studio reworked the entire mask progression system with a new tutorial and tied it to civilisation-rebuilding quests. Your first steps in the game now revolve around understanding the mask, and the late-game goal is ascending from survivor to something that walks alongside gods. I cannot wait to figure out exactly how deep that goes right next to you guys.

How The Multiplayer Works

This is what you actually need to know. Soulmask supports up to 70 players on official servers, with both dedicated PvP and PvE server options. You can also set up your own private server and customise nearly every parameter in the backend and the server settings are apparently genuinely impressive. One Steam review puts it better than I can: "Even the backend server settings are a thing of beauty allowing you to manage nearly every aspect of your gameplay on the fly without needing a restart." That's the kind of thing that matters for a community running their own server.

Private servers let you tailor the pace completely. If you want a slower, more community-driven experience where we're actually building something together over weeks that's possible. If you want faster progression to hit the good stuff more quickly also possible. For anyone who wants to theory craft and then play together, this flexibility is huge.

Combat encounters in multiplayer range from one-on-one duels to full-scale tribal warfare with tactics and logistics. That word logistics is not something survival games usually make interesting. In Soulmask, because of the tribe automation system, it actually matters who's supplying what and from where. Some people are going to love this strategic layer. Some people are going to find it too much. Bear in mind this is a game that rewards patience and planning, not just raw grinding.

Tribe Building and Base Automation

Okay so this is the part that genuinely surprised me about Soulmask. The base-building is good the kind of thing Conan Exiles players will feel at home in. But the tribe management and automation layer on top of it is something else entirely.

Your tribesmen aren't just decorative followers. Each one has over 871 unique talent combinations skills, masteries, preferences. You recruit them by either having them join you or, brilliantly, by possessing them in combat. They specialise. A legendary craftsman is different from a master harvester who's different from a bloodthirsty warrior. And you can set them to work autonomously gathering raw materials, managing logistics, running assembly lines while you're off exploring or fighting.

In 1.0, Campfire Studio upgraded the tribe AI significantly. Smarter job assignments, a new training system where tribesmen can actually learn skills from each other, and a management interface that gives you real-time oversight of storage, production and logistics. You can issue voice commands to your tribe. Like, actual voice commands. I don't understand how that made it into a survival game but it did and I'm here for it.

That split into three modes is genuinely smart design. It means you can play in a way that suits you and still be on the same server. I cannot wait to find out exactly how the cross-mode multiplayer dynamic works in practice. I still don't know exactly how some of that interacts and I'm excited to figure it out together.

Shifting Sands The Free Egypt DLC

Right, so this DLC is free. Was free, technically, for the first month of 1.0 launch (April 10 to May 10), meaning if you grabbed Soulmask anywhere around launch you should have it in your library. Go check right now if you haven't. It's worth having.

Shifting Sands - Egyptian mythology meets alien tech, with airship bases and Horus flight.

Shifting Sands takes you into an entirely new map inspired by ancient Egypt where mythology collides with alien technology. New biomes, new bosses including the Soulcall Hound, the Onyx Scarab, and the Savagehorn Tribe Leader and four new god-themed masks: Horus, Anubis, Amun-Ra and Sobek. Each one unlocks godlike combat abilities that reportedly redefine how you play.

The big new mechanic here is the live-on-your-ship survival system. You build modular ships desert boats, solar airships with anti-gravity engines, full mobile fortresses and you can use them as your actual base while traversing the desert landscape. That is a genuinely different survival meta and I said it this is the kind of thing that makes this game worth watching.

The Sanxingdui DLC that came before this had 95% positive reviews on Steam. The baseline quality is clearly there. Whether Shifting Sands hits the same heights, we're going to find out together.

What's Not Perfect

It's not perfect, and I'm not going to pretend it is. Let's be honest about what you're walking into.

Combat in Soulmask can get wild fast. That is a very large cat.

The early game throws a lot of information at you. Like, a lot. There's a constant stream of tutorial prompts and the crafting trees go deep immediately. Some reviewers describe hitting the info wall and just giving up on reading everything and figuring it out by trying things. That's actually how I'd recommend approaching it but bear in mind, some people are going to find the onboarding overwhelming and check out before the game gets good.

Combat, particularly in the early game against barbarian camps, can feel punishing in an unfair way. Elite enemies that can stun-lock you while a horde piles in is a frustration that multiple reviewers flagged. It's not impossible levelling up your resistance to stuns and poisons addresses it but it's not a bug, it's just a design choice that's going to make some people put the game down before they should.

And the story is basically absent. There's a genuinely great cinematic opening and then that's it the last cinematic you'll ever see. The lore exists in the world but don't come in expecting a narrative to carry you. The game is completely systems-driven, and if you need a story hook to stay engaged, this might not be your thing.

These moments are real but they're not dealbreakers if you're willing to push through, the game opens up significantly. The development team has been active and responsive throughout Early Access, and 1.0 has 1,800 updates in it. The direction of travel is clearly right.

Is Soulmask 1.0 worth playing?

Yes. I think Soulmask is one of the most interesting multiplayer survival games available right now and it's built for exactly the kind of player who wants to build something with others rather than just survive solo and occasionally run into people.

800,000 players and 80% positive reviews on Steam at 1.0. Survival Game of the Year 2024. A free Egypt DLC with airship bases and god masks. It's just built different.