DarkSwitch on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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DarkSwitch is a vertical survival city builder. Build a city on a great tree and defend it against the Fog. Face the challenges of limited real estate, scarce resources, and tough moral choices as you seek to uncover the mystery of the Shroud. The Tree Provides! The Tree Protects! The Tree Prevails!
DarkSwitch is a city builder, colony sim and survival game
developed by Cyber Temple
and published by Cyber Temple Games LLC.
Released on April 09th 2026 is available only on Windows
in 6 languages: English, German, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese and French.
It has received 553 reviews of which 427 were positive and 126 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.3 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 29.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 13.59€ on Instant Gaming.
The Steam community has classified DarkSwitch into these genres:
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-11400 / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 6600 (6+ ГБ VRAM)
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 30 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Required
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This is a great game with a nice story and gameplay but that is bogged down by quite a few bugs and bad design choices. Lets start with the good stuff: - Great thematic world building - Most base mechanics are nice and intuitive. The advanced resources are a nice touch for base management decisions, use the inefficient raw materials or wait to refine them first? - Beautiful art direction - Nice story decisions - Decent balanced difficulty for the 1st half of the game (more on that later). Minor annoyances: - Voice acting is... weird to put it mildly - Cinematics have 20 year old graphics, which I actually found kind of endearing :D - The main characters act very erratic at times and are very unlikable as a result: Valfidis is someone who is doing his best to save his civilization, but keeps acting like a petty spoiled brat at times. Ginoa is a merciless and violent captain that would do anything to attain her goal... until she isnt... until she becomes an idealistic imbecile that would rather risk the extermination of her civilization in order to attempt to "save everyone", despite being told that it is impossible by Neammos. (She got lucky at the end, is all im gonna say) Neammos is the only likable hero that has even a semblance of intellect, but that intellect is called into doubt at the end when he surrenders to Ginoa when she bluffs that she will kill everyone if she does not get her way... Now for the bad stuff: - The game has a lot of bugs, especially when it comes to enemies. Hopefully they will be fixed eventually - The overworld map camera is too slow and lack a decent zoom out view. When a mission tells you to scout a thing on X region, you have to VERY SLOWLY move over every region name until you find the one you need. - There is a terrible design decision on the start of chapter one where you have 2 scout points, the fishing place and the lumberjack place. If you choose the lumberjack place first, congratulations, you lost. Time to reload the checkpoint. For unknown reasons, building the fishing shack is locked behind that first scout area, so if you scout the lumberjack, by the time the scouts are ready for the next one you are out of food since you dont have the building to get it. Can you guess what is the cost for scouting the fishing place? Food... - I did not like the way watchtowers operate. Until you can add weapons on them, they are very slow to react to threats causing you to lose resources or even deaths - Solar and its advanced form crystalline. Normally you use planks (advanced resource of wood), which then gets replenished by refining your wood which in turn is replenished by your gatherers. Unlike the other resources you DO NOT refine solar into crystalline, you simply gather it (with advanced gathering buildings). That means that solar is a WORTHLESS resource. You use crystalline and then you gather more of it, while your solar remains unchanged... why does it even exist then? - Terrible pacing and difficulty scaling after the halfway mark of the campaign. There are finite resources and you have to relocate once they run out, or just split up your gatherers so that they do not deplete everything fast. You should also invest as early as you can on advances resources since they effectively double the available resources. I only had to relocate each resource type twice. Until you gain access to outposts... after some point (around day 40ish, not sure), I was done with resources. My metal and gas areas were depleted but I didnt even bother to rellocate, I had infinite resources (1000+ of each resource, raw and advanced until the end of the game). Coupled with 2 max level healing buildings I was done with the game... literally. I put it on fast forward and watched a movie while returning to check on events and story choices. The latter quarter of the game was me being bored out of my mind doing nothing. The overworld map was filled to the brim with cargo locations which I never needed (probably didnt even scout more than 20 cargo locations). Endless waiting until the ending event, and even that was anticlimactic with all my watchtowers and light orb thingies. Why am I recommending this? 20 out of my 23hours were quite a bit of fun. I even restarted a couple of times because I messed up with either food or sickness, but that is part of the fun for me. If you want a semi difficult base survival game to scratch that frostpunk itch, this is it. If you want an easy game you can play for the story you might wanna stay clear since there is no difficulty option (so far)
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After playing through the game i gotta say that i do really like the story telling and the world building and while the game does still have some bugs the devs are activly working hard on fixing them. In the beginning the gameplay is very good but i have to admit that in the late stages of the game you dont really have that much to do anymore other than waiting for the story to progress which i find suboptimal. Overall i would still recommend this game to people looking for a Frostpunk like game and dont mind it still being a little rough around the edges.
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Okay, I have beaten the game, and here is my review. The good, the bad and the less than ideal. Potential minor spoilers. First off the good stuff! - I enjoy the theme! It's engaging and has a ton of potential! - Branching stories, the game presents several choices that affect your ending. - BEAUTIFUL game, I honestly think the main map, and the world map looks awesome! - Active developer, who is working to fix the game! - Some people will hate the voice-over, as it can be jarring at times, but honestly I don't mind. It's nice that it's not just text and it moves the story along. - Love the building on the tree, I honestly wish they would expand it even more! Either expand it further or add more risk/reward for building on the "safe" tree vs the ground. The bad stuff... - There still are a lot of bugs that need to be sorted out. Even basic stuff -- Units not moving, I had an airship getting stuck on the world map, it stayed stuck for the rest of the game. -- I rarely paid attention to my individual people, but I've heard they can get stuck as well. - Combat needs work -- Combat doesn't feel that engaging. It's mostly click, send squad, leave, or pointing a big laser at spirits that units can't hurt. Some of the monsters don't even have proper animations (or they simply bugged out?). I wish there was more depth, as I ended up placing towers at each production hub and rarely had to think about combat at all. - The overworld map seems nice, but it more or less invalidates the need for the local scout squads. Lategame you can have 3 squads, I never felt like I needed more than 2 (often 1 was plenty). Ships feel strictly like a better version of the scouts, more loot, more impact, and more meaningful events. Making the squard only useful for defense. - Don't get why we weren't just humans? I guess the "live in a big tree" means elves, but honestly I just ignored it. The Ugly: -Pacing is not the best, you go from a few quest, to drowning, to none..? -- I ended up spending a lot of time just waiting for the next event, and even bugged some because I had cleared an objective before a quest popped up to do it. Nothing that can't be solved with a few adjustments. -- I also got quest to do something for X time, but the total quest length was shorter than the time needed to complete it (making it an auto fail). - Give me more people! -- I only used 30% of the main map to beat the game, and it's not because I didn't want to expand or defend it, I simply didn't have the people to expand. Even after I had rescued every single villager I could find! (I may have encountered a bug, early game events that rewarded people simply stopped appearing at some point.) - The shift in characters. -- This one is tricky, because it's more about the writing. But our main cast changes personalities across the game. From being an adventurous captain (pirate/rogue), who would do anything for her goals, to suddenly becoming a peace-focused main character..? They already had better options setup for that role, so it just felt very odd to me. It might be because my stories got mixed into each other (see next point), but it was a very quick shift without any event, I felt warranted a change of heart. - The questlines ran on top of each other..? -- I ended with some weird and hilarious outcomes, because of the overlapping questlines. I ended in war vs a faction that adored me, while their leader was dead? I don't think this was inteded, but it was hilarious! A potential fix could be to have more triggers that block or delay conflicting events. Final Verdict: Did I enjoy this game - YES even though it can be buggy, I believe this will get sorted out relatively quickly. Would I play it a ton? - No, once you have cleared the different stories it's sort of over. But it's enjoyable while it last. I believe it's important to focus on something to end, rather than push for infinite gametime. In the current state I would give it a 7/10 - once the worst bugs have been sorted out it's a solid 8/10. Not perfect but certainly not bad. Worth the money in my opinion. Who should buy it: -City managers + story-rich players, just remember in the current stage, you cannot create mega cities (due to limited population). Who should wait: -People who cannot handle bugs - come back in a few months. -People who wish to min-max their entire settlement - I believe you would find the lack of agency for the villagers annoying in the current stage. Hope this helps!
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It’s a pretty interesting game, reminiscent of Frostpunk. As usual, it’s all about making tough decisions, and your most important resource is, of course, your people. As usual, everyone’s against you—everyone’s out to screw you over. But I’d like to see even more research and production branches, and more complex chains. Although it might not be obvious in the first hour, you have to keep playing to find out. So far, it’s pretty interesting.
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If you liked Frostpunk you will like this game, they're incredibly similar. The gameplay is pretty much what I expected, there's some jank when it comes to cutscenes and cinematics, and it's not amazingly optimized so its a little sluggish when loading some things even on the lowest settings. Not the worst launch state I've seen for a game tbh My main gripe is the audio is really, really bad. Most of the voice acting is okay, some of it is pretty rough. The pacing of delivery is pretty robotic all around, and the written dialogue isn't great. The background music was the most painful, and it was put to mute immediately, and the sound effects for a lot of stuff was just pretty painful too. Considering the game is aiming at an immersive darker theme, it really struggles to connect because of this issue for me. Probably a fun game if you just play on mute.
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Frequently Asked Questions
DarkSwitch is currently priced at 29.99€ on Steam.
No, DarkSwitch is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 29.99€ on Steam.
Yes, DarkSwitch received 427 positive votes out of a total of 553 achieving a rating of 7.32.
😊
DarkSwitch was developed by Cyber Temple and published by Cyber Temple Games LLC.
Yes, DarkSwitch is playable and fully supported on Windows.
No, DarkSwitch is not playable on MacOS.
No, DarkSwitch is not playable on Linux.
DarkSwitch is a single-player game.
Yes, there is a DLC available for DarkSwitch. Explore additional content available for DarkSwitch on Steam.
No, DarkSwitch does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
No, DarkSwitch does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, DarkSwitch is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for DarkSwitch.
Data sources
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 03 June 2026 17:09 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 01 June 2026 19:23 |
| Steam price | 03 June 2026 21:01 |
| Steam reviews | 02 June 2026 21:48 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about DarkSwitch, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about DarkSwitch
- SteamCharts - Analysis of DarkSwitch concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck DarkSwitch compatibility
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Game modes
Features
Online players
30
Developer
Cyber Temple
Publisher
Cyber Temple Games LLC
Release
09 Apr 2026
Platforms
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