Notmads builds your base on the back of something alive

You are a mage whose house breathes. The beast carries your base across the world, and you can ride with it or walk ahead and let it come to you. On its back, powered by its core, you put magical stations, refineries, potion benches and defensive towers, until the thing you sleep in is also a fortress that moves. You play it in first or third person, which is a small option that quietly matters — one view is for fighting, the other is for looking at what you have made.

The gathering verb is the genuinely unusual one. There is no axe and no pickaxe. You point a Magical Beam at what you want and take it apart, and the beam itself is what you upgrade. New kinds of gathering arrive as new capability in a tool you already carry, rather than as another item taking up another slot. The materials go back into refining, brewing, combining gear and automating parts of the base, so the beam sits at the head of every chain in the game.

Combat is mage-shaped without being class-shaped. Fire, frost, lightning, arcane power or plain physical strength, with spells that turn up in tiers, stats and variations, and no path that locks behind you. What you are is decided by the gear and perks you happen to find, which means the answer can change in the middle of a session because a better drop argued for it.

The world is handcrafted rather than generated — towns, caves, camps, places that are hidden because someone hid them — and up to five players can share one beast. Not five bases side by side. The same base, the same stations, the same walls, moving while you work on it.

The Genius of Prey’s Gloo Cannon makes the case that one odd tool can carry combat, exploration, hazard control and improvisation at once, and that a game which spends its budget deepening a single object gets more out of it than a game handing out five specialised ones. The Magical Beam is that bet placed in the harvesting slot. Every survival game before it solved gathering with an inventory of tools; this one solved it with a verb that levels up, which is a much smaller surface to design and a much better one to make interesting.

What to build first in an open world argues that the first real job is not the map, it is a hundred metres of ground you enjoy crossing, because everything else is built on top of that walk. Notmads changes the terms of the sentence rather than dodging it. The base crossing the ground with you removes the empty return trip that rots most survival worlds — but it also means the ground has to hold up twice, once at walking pace on foot and once from the back of something large and slow. If the beast is boring to ride, no amount of building on it helps.

How Overcooked’s kitchens force you to communicate points out that the strongest co-op does not hand players different powers, it hands everyone the same tools and lets the space create the friction. Five people on one moving platform is exactly that shape. Nobody has an assigned role, the floor is finite, and it is in motion while you are all trying to place things on it. The interruptions are the design.

Notmads is made and published by [Rhomita](https://notmads.com/), out now in early access on Windows, filed under Action, Adventure, Indie and RPG. It has full controller support, Steam achievements, and co-op that runs online or over LAN for up to five players, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.

Early access is the honest label for something this systemic. Building, crafting, magic and a shared world all touch each other here, and games in that shape are finished by tuning rather than by adding, so the interesting question is what the beast feels like six months from now.

If the pull is a base that refuses to stay put, Railborn is the other one on this list — a base that is a train, where the track is the decision. Both games take the one thing survival design usually nails to the floor and set it moving; Railborn does it on rails you choose, Notmads does it on legs that follow you.