Their Land

Few games in this review's research turned up as clean and specific a launch controversy as Their Land's. Multiple independent reviewers describe the same event: a short-form video, or several, characterized the game as a multiplayer open-world survival title in the vein of The Forest or Green Hell — something it was never built to be — and a wave of buyers arrived expecting exactly that. When the actual product turned out to be a linear, story-driven first-person exploration-and-puzzle game with a limited side mode for co-op, a review-bombing wave followed, compounded by a second, entirely real problem: the game ran badly for a meaningful share of players at launch, regardless of what they expected going in.

What the game actually is

Stripped of the viral hype, Their Land casts the player as a young man exploring an island with a group of more experienced companions, working through a mix of environmental puzzles, light combat and platforming-adjacent traversal. Reviewers who approached it on its own terms, rather than through the lens of the mismatched marketing, generally describe a short (five-to-six-hour), visually ambitious solo project with a story that starts with real atmosphere but doesn't fully sustain it. The puzzle design draws specific criticism for repetition — several reviewers describe a recurring "find an item, cross the gap" structure that doesn't meaningfully vary across the game's length, and voice acting and lip-sync are consistently described as rough, even accounting for the scale of a one-person team.

The advertised co-op mode is a separate point of friction distinct from the TikTok controversy. Rather than playing the story campaign together, co-op here is a standalone wave-based survival mode. Several reviewers feel this is close enough to false advertising to call out specifically — the word "co-op" implies playing the actual game together to a lot of buyers, and what's on offer is a different, smaller mode entirely.

A genuinely bad launch, not just a misunderstood one

It would be a mistake to read every negative review here as purely a casualty of viral misinformation. A large, independent cluster of complaints describes real, severe performance problems at launch — frame rates in the teens on capable hardware even at the lowest graphics settings, and at least one detailed account of frame rates degrading further the longer a play session continued. Global achievement data supports how serious this was in practice: only around 41% of owners ever reach the game's very first story milestone, a steep early drop-off that's consistent both with players bouncing off poor performance and with buyers discovering quickly that the game wasn't what viral marketing had promised them.

The response is the real story here

What distinguishes Their Land from a typical rough solo launch is what happened next. The developer's public patch history shows a "Massive Performance Update" landing within roughly 24 hours of release, followed by four more explicitly performance-focused updates inside the first week alone. That cadence didn't taper off quickly — a further round of CPU and GPU performance work shipped in September 2023, and a full engine-level overhaul billed as "Huge Performance, Gameplay, Coop and Engine Upgrade" arrived in November 2024, well over a year after launch, with further foliage and visual performance work following in April 2025 and an achievement-system fix in July

2025. Language support also expanded substantially post-launch, with a dedicated update adding

"many more languages" in August 2023. Few solo developers sustain this level of visible, consistent technical investment in a single already-shipped title for over two years, and reviewers who returned to the game after the early patches consistently report a night-and-day difference from what the original wave of reviews described.

Reviewing the reviews

Because the review-bombing wave is such a large part of this game's public reputation, it's worth being specific about what the corroborated version of that story actually looks like, rather than treating "some people were misled" as a hand-wave excuse for every negative review. Several detailed reviews independently name the same short-form creators as the source of the mischaracterization, and describe the developer as having had no advance knowledge of or involvement in those videos before the backlash hit. That's a meaningfully different situation from a developer over-promising in their own marketing, and it's worth distinguishing clearly: the game's own store page and trailers don't appear to be the source of the mismatch that drove much of the early negative wave, even though the game's actual technical problems at the time were entirely real and entirely its own.

That distinction matters for how to read the review split. A subset of negative reviews are specifically and verifiably about performance — frame rate, stability, crashing — and those complaints track closely with a launch-era build that the developer has since spent over two years visibly working to fix. A separate subset are about the game simply not being the multiplayer survival title some buyers expected, which is a legitimate disappointment for those players but isn't a flaw in the game itself so much as a mismatch nobody involved with actually making the game created. Weighing the two together fairly means neither dismissing the real performance history outright nor treating every one-star review as illegitimate noise.

A developer still building

One additional data point is worth noting for context: in May 2024, close to a year after Their Land's launch and in the middle of its ongoing performance-patch cycle, the developer publicly announced a new, larger-scoped project titled "Wilds of Iron" as being in development. That a solo developer kept shipping substantial fixes to an already-released, modestly-priced game while also starting a new project suggests a level of ongoing commitment to Their Land that goes beyond simply patching a broken launch and moving on — this doesn't read as a game abandoned in favor of something newer so much as one still actively maintained alongside it.

Where it lands

Their Land is a genuinely difficult game to score cleanly, because so much of its reputation was shaped by a controversy that has little to do with what the game actually is or how it currently runs. Judged as what it's actually trying to be — a modest, ambitious, occasionally rough solo-developed exploration adventure — it's a reasonable, inexpensive few hours let down more by thin story pacing and repetitive puzzle design than by the performance problems that dominated its launch reviews. The mislabelled co-op mode and the sheer scale of the early mismatched-expectations wave are real, legitimate reasons for its still-Mixed rating, but the developer's sustained, transparent response to the parts of the criticism that were actually about the game itself is worth real credit, and worth knowing about before writing this one off based on its launch-era review score alone.