Bleary-eyed, I looked at the time on my phone. It was 12:30PM. I'd sat down to play ARK: Survival Evolved at 3AM. I still didn't see nor get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex yet, thankfully.

Being an open-world junkie, I got the game during the 20% off sale for $23.99 (Tk. 2100 at BDBOX on Facebook) on Steam. My friend got another copy as well and after playing singleplayer for some time, I decided to host a server. It was the beginning of extreme sleep-deprivation borne from my hellbent desire to build a bridge across a river that led us towards a Brontosaurus. 

I was dropped straight onto the beach and my friend was dropped on the other side when we joined. We literally had no way of knowing where we were in the game. I turned on the microphone and half-screamed "NEAR THE BIG BRONTOSAURUS ON THE BEACH," only to hear "WHICH ONE?" in reply. We ran around the beach in the dark for some time (my friend died thrice during this phase.) After daybreak, I was looking at the dawning sun and wondering if there was a global marker out there that helped us navigate towards each other. This is when I realized that I would probably die after a few hours in the wilderness. I turned on the mic again and yelled "I'M ON THE EASTERN END OF THE BEACH, NEAR THE GREEN SPACESHIP." It was not a spaceship, it was possibly a supply drop. Ones that fall out of the sky and light up for some reason. 15 hours into the game, I still haven't gotten anywhere near the big-ass spaceship-like things that vaguely resemble Reapers from Mass Effect. I digress. Back at the beach, my friend managed to find me, at that moment I pressed M and found that there's a roughly drawn map on my character. I was on one of the many, many islands in the map. Luckily, we both spawned on the same island. Then we got chased by a couple of Dilophosauruses and got killed. After repeating the aforementioned scenario a few times, we managed to make a hatchet and a pickaxe. A roughly-built campfire later, we found several dodos that we killed to gain XP to make a thatch house. This game didn't hold our hand and tell us what to do. That is where the immersion comes in. There is no tutorial. That might put off a lot of people, quite rightly so but the game is designed in such a way that everything comes intuitively unless you're geographically-challenged like I am. 

Some 20 levels and 8 hours later, we managed to knock a Triceratops down and almost tamed it to do our bidding. To tame a dino, you have to whack it unconscious, feed it berries and use narcotics to keep it unconscious until it submits to your will. It's something out of the page of Bill Cosby's dating manual. Creepiness aside, the game's mechanics are quite well fleshed out. 

Many would say that Early Access games are ruining the industry but ARK is the sort of game that does Early Access right in a way that actually helps the industry. I daresay that it's done better than some full version AAA games that we had in recent months. If you'd like to have a real taste of the game, I suggest Cr1tikal's (penguinz0 on YouTube) gameplay video. Keep in mind that the game is not as buggy as he makes it out to be. The devs roll out updates almost twice a week.  There are no game-breaking bugs as of yet.