The Last Caretaker | Early Access Review

June 19, 2026 Eric Sandler

The Last Caretaker, from developer Channel37 Limited, is not a game for the aquaphobic or for those who like companionship. You’re a lone robot on an oil tanker sailing an endless sea, totally alone except for the creepy voice in your head telling you to save humanity and put them on rockets into space. To do this, you’ll need to repair old world structures and labs, scavenge for materials, and fight off hordes of mysterious and hostile bio-bots. And manage wires. Lots and lots of wires.

You Need A Bigger Boat

Your robot avatar starts out in an abandoned complex where the game puts you through your paces: interacting with the environment, powering lights and machines, and keeping yourself well-juiced to boot. Soon you find your permanent home base: a big-bottom oil tanker, complete with recycler, fabricator, and enough space for a growing robot to run and play. Getting the ship up and running and able to leave the complex to begin with is your first major task in the game, and it serves as a good tutorial for what is the main gameplay loop: find floating installations and points of interest, establish some form of power generation to get inside and get things running, then loot the place of anything that’s not nailed down.

It’s very similar to Raft, in a sense, though different in one key aspect: friends. Both games involve you scavenging resources, building up a floating base, and using said base to explore an endless ocean. However, in The Last Caretaker, there’s no multiplayer component. You are indeed the last of the caretakers of humanity, and it’s all on your shoulders to get everything powered up and ready to export humankind to the stars.

The base building, which is the meat of the game, is fairly straightforward. You can throw objects found in the world into the recycler and get the corresponding base elements (iron, copper, plastic, and so on). Or if you’re out in the field, use your handy shredding tool to break down objects into scrap, then recycle the scrap when you’re back on your ship. Then you take those base materials and build wind or solar generators, portable batteries or diesel containers, or various other tools to aid you in your exploration…like a gun!

Robots Need Guns!

Okay, you only sort of need guns. It’s a hostile world, yes, with bio-mechanical bots bursting out of weird black pustules on the various points of interest you’ll find. However, they’re typically slow and you can easily tackle them by backing up and whacking them with your crowbar. Gordon Freeman’s legacy lives on! Eventually guns do provide some much-needed firepower against heavier foes, but for the most part, you can get through encounters by beating them to death. This is good, because you don’t really get the heavy weaponry until later in the game.

The bio-bots are your secondary obstacle on all the major quest locations. The primary obstacle is getting everything powered. That means building windmills and solar panels to power machines, and running wires and tubes across the width and breadth of creation to ensure everything is running smoothly. Humanity needs to be restored and pickled and fired into space, and without sufficient electricity, water, and bio-mass, they’re not going to make it. In short, you’re going to be establishing bases all over the place in order to complete your mission. It’s not an automation game, so if you enjoy crunchy resource management and base building, there’s plenty to do.

Early Adopter Status

The game has been in early access for a whopping six months, and it’s gotten major content updates since then. The developers have said they expect it to be in EA for at least 12 months, which means a possible late 2026 or early 2027 release, but even now it’s pretty content and feature-rich. If you’re into these kinds of survival and base building games, there’s a lot of ocean to explore, with more content on the way.

Minor Quibbles

Some areas I thought the game could improve upon, since it’s Early Access:

Wiring yourself to a power supply to recharge needs to be a single button press to start and stop. Right now it’s press a button to connect a cable to the supply, then long-press a button to connect it to yourself, then another press to remove the cable, then a long press to spool up that cable, and that’s only if you’re not nearby something else that you can interact with. One button to recharge, same button to spool up that wire and go about your business. Same thing applies to the heal station and save point (that one at least has a long press for a quick save).
A few advanced maneuvers in-game should have pop-up tips somewhere, such as mooring your ship. The process itself, along with the fact that you can do it from the start, isn’t explained, yet it’s insanely useful for pulling your ship alongside a structure without being a master helmsbot.
Scrapping items in general should be faster. Yes, there’s a skill you can improve to increase your scrapping speed, but it’s the thing you do so often in the game that it consumes an outsized percentage of your game time.
Considering you don’t ever acquire enough skill points to fully max your stats, there should be a way to re-spec your abilities. You’re a robot, after all, you can theoretically reprogram yourself and swap out parts. Right now if you drop skill points in things you later find to not be useful, the only way to correct this is to start a new game.

To hear me talk more about The Last Caretaker, be sure to listen to June 9th, 2026 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:36:01 time stamp.