Honestly this game is promising and these types of games are right up my alley however I can not recommend it at the moment. At my current specs, 5900x - 5070 - 64gb ram - m.2 install, the game runs pretty poorly. Yes I am playing on 1440p but that shouldn't be an issue for this machine as I run several games at 1440p without issue. All drivers are up to date as well and I do not believe in the whole "hurr durr ue5 bad" crap, I play plenty ue5 games without issues (heck I can run windrose at 120fps cap without issue).

I've tried giving it a moment to wait for the usual shader compiling you'd see in games, however it just does not get better. Setting my fps cap to 120 my fps stays at 40-60 when on high and 50-65 when on medium with temps peaking higher than I see in most other games I play. For example my gpu usually will not go above 61c however here it goes up to 68c (and it wouldn't surprise me if it went higher) and the cpu hits 72c with ease while not even being under 35% load, those kinds of cpu temps I'd normally observe under much higher loads. If I compare this behavior with what I see in other games then this is far from the norm for my machine given the loads it experiences.
Attempting different upscaling or fps caps etc does not improve anything either.

Given steam only has a 2 hour window for refunds I do not feel comfortable spending another 1.5 hours trying to troubleshoot this.

I will continue to keep my eye on this game but for now I will have to refund. It is a shame though because this would've been right up my alley.
For anyone else I would recommend spending 20-30 minutes first running around a bit and tweaking some settings while monitoring your hardware.

Having spent more hours on the game, I'm revising my earlier review again:

Voyagers of Nera is an enjoyable experience, but likely more for the cozy gaming crowd. As a survival game, it has severe design flaws that missed my expectations.

The core progression follows a standard loop of gathering materials and base building, mixed with reading lore pillars and rescuing spirits or runes. While the concept works on paper, the execution feels incredibly shallow.

1. Tools and Materials

Tried and proven progession: enter a biome, craft the next workbench tier, and upgrade tools (Stone > Sharpstone > Metal). The initial upgrade feels good because basic durability is terrible. However, by the second biome, I completely forgot to upgrade to metal because there was no point. Upgraded stone tools already lasted long enough to encumber me before breaking, and higher tiers offer no unique features or harvesting moves.

2. Base Building

Bases are largely useless. A functional base only requires a one-room shelter for a bed(Because that needs a roof), workbenches, and storage. The "Spirit Amenities" grant powerful buffs, but they wear off too quickly to be practical for adventures.

Worse, building is an absolute grind. Materials are heavy, forcing you to spend your time slowly hauling materials back to slowly process them into planks and such. Building a simple, undecorated four-room base in the second biome took as long as completing the entire biome's objectives. By the time it was finished, I was ready to move on, making the effort feel like a waste of time.

3. Lore Pillars and Markings

The narrative is delivered via monoliths (where "ancients" babble vaguely about the deep) and markings (recounting past survivors' daily lives). While visiting them awards recipe points, the writing feels deeply uninspired and reads like AI-generated filler. It uses a lot of words to say absolutely nothing.

4. Spirits, Runes, and Trials

Rescuing spirits involves a repetitive cycle: start at your base altar to reveal a location, travel there to grab it, and head all the way back just to reveal the next one. This constant backtracking to mark your map is a major hassle. Furthermore, the encounters never change; sometimes basic enemies spawn, sometimes it's free to grab

Runes require the same three repetitive tasks: a fight against the exact same construct enemy, a child-level puzzle, and another forgettable activity. (Which I literally forgot while writing this) Meanwhile, the "Primordial Trials" for passive skills feel like boring escort quests, featuring trivial challenges like riding through rings, actual escorting, or Zelda-esque shooting rubies under a time limit. Freeing the Elder Spirit is equally underwhelming, offering waves of basic trash mobs instead of an epic boss battle.

Combat and Enemies

Biomes simply reskin the same experience, pitting you against three basic enemy archetypes: melee grunts, beefy tanks, and ranged attackers that shoot very slow projectiles. Their attack patterns and timing seem identical between biomes. Running a tanky parry build had me pay attention to that.

No enemy poses a real threat; you can out-walk 80% of attacks. You can dodge, block, or parry, but only if you feel like putting in the effort. The ocean is largely empty, populated by a few hostile fish that swim up, bite, and swim away, kinda like subnautica, where the game makes you think you're in danger, but then gives you a ridiculous amount of time to either run or heal or whatever.

Seafaring, Physics, and Food

For a game set entirely on the ocean, the water physics and weather effects are disappointing. Water is just a flat plane that wobbles, and you don't even produce splashes on the beach. Diving is mostly pointless, though the developers promise a future "depths worth diving" update.

Furthermore, making a seafaring survival game without a fishing rod is a massive oversight. Sneaking up on fish with a spear for basic food is a hassle when more convenient nutrition is readily available.

Exploration, Boats, and Forms

We've got cool modular boat building in Nera! Too bad that boats are completely useless by the time you unlock your skimmer (the surfboard). It's faster, always in your inventory, and just overall far superior to the boats you can build. You can put a respawn point on a boat, but honestly, if you manage to die in this game unironically, I dunno what to tell you.

Oh, and you can put cannons on the boat! Though I haven't found an actual use for said cannons. Am I supposed to shoot the fish? The spires? There are corrupted spires in the game which have a huge dome around them that gives you a corruption debuff, but to kill those you have to remove some icky glowing pustules underwater, so no cannon shooting here either. The aiming and shooting of said cannons is terrible anyway, so it's probably a good thing you don't need them for anything.

Exploring the islands isn't rewarding either. There are chests scattered around, but they only ever contain the exact same materials you can find just lying around anywhere else. There are no cool unique items to find, no upgraded recipes for existing items, or anything else that actually warrants going out of your way to explore each island to the fullest.

Rescuing an Elder Spirit gives you access to a temporary "form." The first one being the Ocean Form, which is frankly the best way of transportation in the game, period. It gives you movement speed in water and infinite sprint when using the skimmer, so you can just breeze through the otherwise painfully slow traversal.

You can even just skim through "the deep," which is like a super scary place in between the biomes where you're being chased by a huge sea serpent and are supposed to go from lantern to lantern because the light of the ancients protects you. But why do all that when you can just skim through it with style? Too bad Ocean Form has a very long cooldown. Surfing across the ocean silver surfer style is easily the coolest thing in the game, though you can't do tricks or anything because that would require waves, which are not a thing in Nera.

The second biome unlocks a glider, but because we cannot climb, we're at the developers' mercy and have to rely on wind geysers to get up and glide anywhere. Luckily, the Ocean Form is faster anyway, and the glider is basically just the gimmick of the biome and is useless outside of preventing fall damage perhaps.

Performance

A quick note on performance: I was only able to achieve 80 fps at best on maximum settings, despite my good setup. It's good by nowadays "standards" where most games launch in a much worse state, but it's still nowhere near where it should be. The game also has major asset pop-ins. All of this is very puzzling considering the game has neither fancy physics nor demanding graphics to justify the heavy load.

Conclusion

Having reached the third and final biome of the current Early Access build, I’m calling it quits. Looking ahead, it’s just the same grind repeated. Strategy-wise, it's most efficient to keep your base in the starting area and simply connect fast travel portals to the latter biomes, as rebuilding an entirely new base in each biome takes a ton of time and serves no functional purpose unless you enjoy purely cosmetic building.

I am leaving a Positive Review because I recognize this game will be fantastic for the right audience; I am just not that audience. Additionally, the great developer response just warrants this game doing as well as it can. I hope this feedback helps the developers as well as people looking to make an informed decision about buying the game.

It's a cute, cozy game, but nothing really grabs you. Combat is dull and repetitive. Boss fights, blink and you'll miss it. Archery is redundant. The aesthetics are nice for the genre... But it is an extremely easy game and definately fits the family friendly category. It's not worth the full price tag for the content it has and playability, I probably wouldn't be happy even getting it on sale price.