Sheltered

Strategy

Ratings

Age

13+

Strategy

Languages

English

Latest Version 1.0

Fri Oct 30 2026

Sheltered is a deep and emotional survival strategy game from Team17. Set in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, players must manage a small underground bunker to keep their family alive. The gameplay involves a complex balance of resource management—securing food and water while maintaining the shelter's life-support systems. Beyond the bunker, you must send family members into the unforgiving wasteland to scavenge, where they will face feral beasts, roaming factions, and tense turn-based combat. Every choice, from who eats to how you deal with strangers, shapes the attributes and survival of your family in this acclaimed indie title.

Dinsun Expert Review

Our Expert Score

84/100

Sheltered is a brutal, heart-wrenching, and deeply rewarding survival management game that fits perfectly on mobile. It takes the concept of the 'nuclear family' and places it in the grimmest possible context, forcing you to make moral decisions that genuinely weigh on your conscience. Do you share your dwindling water with a stranger, or secure your family's survival for one more day?

The pixel art style is evocative, creating a sense of isolation and decay that permeates every session. The transition to touch controls is well-handled, making the complex task of managing shelter repairs, crafting weapons, and assigning wasteland expeditions feel tactile. It’s a game of high stakes and emergent storytelling where every expedition could result in a vital resource find or a tragic loss. For fans of survival strategy, Sheltered is an essential, if harrowing, experience.

Dinsun reviewed on: Wed Feb 25 2026

Features

Deep family-based survival management mechanics

Scavenging expeditions in a procedurally generated wasteland

Complex crafting system for tools, weapons, and shelter upgrades

Tense turn-based combat against humans and beasts

Moral choice system with lasting consequences

Evolving character attributes and skill progression

Tips & Walkthrough

Surviving the First Week

Prioritize upgrading your water filter and oxygen system immediately; without these, your shelter is a tomb. When scavenging, send characters with high perception to find better loot, and always equip them with the best crafted weapons you have to survive random encounters.

Gameplays

Management and Exploration

The game is split between 'Shelter Management' (building, repairing, and caring for family needs) and 'Wasteland Exploration' (scavenging and combat). Turn-based combat requires tactical thinking, using your family's evolving skills to overcome threats.

Screenshot

Q&A

No, death is permanent in Sheltered. Once a family member is lost, they are gone for that playthrough, emphasizing the high stakes of your choices.

Ratings & Reviews

Glitches

Thu Apr 05 2018 Download apocalypse

Honestly, this game is amazing. I play it a lot, and from the time I have played it, I have to report some glitches. I hope you take these into consideration. 1. I usually play and just close out of the game and i go back on and it usually works. But sometimes it reset the game, and that’s fine but when I... let’s say I Set up and exposition and I close the game and it resets, sometimes it doesn’t save so I’m back to make it again. It honestly not a big deal, but try to fix it. 2. This one is a little annoying, so I built a luxury shower and it had been used for a while. But once it has been used for a while, it doesn’t give the option to take a shower, it’s like it didn’t even exist, this happened everytime I deconstructed and built it. This happened to a few other thing but this is the one that happened most often 3. This one caused me to delete one of my games that had 200+ Days. So when I do the close game and re open it while it’s on an expedition (This usually only happens when I take the camper van) I close the game, it resets and I open the game file, then I came up to the exposition not even there anymore, it says on the map there is a expedition, but the green marker is at the shelter, and you can’t see the path you made, you can still recall it, but no one will come back. It is very annoying. If you hope you guys take the time to read my post. It might have some writing error since I was in a hurry. I thank you for making such an amazing game, and take the time and effort to make it better Sincerely, Lucas

Love the concept, just seems a little unbalanced...

Tue Apr 03 2018 ChorizoTacos117

I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic themed games and this one could have a lot of potential to make it on to the indie pc scene. But to start, the tutorial is less than helpful. It introduces you to basic movement and interaction processes, but once you get past that you’re pretty much left on you own to figure stuff out and honestly, it could just be me, but I got kind of lost in what to do next. And this is where I feel it becomes unbalanced... So the necessities are food, water, and hygienic functions. You start with a small supply of food, and water. So you start an expedition to find more food. 2 different families I’ve played at this point and 8 expeditions between them, and I’ve only found 5 cans of food. So, I built a snare trap, because that’s the only thing my feeble little mind can build. I caught a rabbit. I go to harvest it and I can’t because I don’t have anywhere to to store the meat and leather. So I go to build some storage, and with no direction it seems as though the only place to store the meat is in a freezer. But that’s the tier 2 which I can’t access because I haven’t upgraded my work bench. So I go on more expeditions to try and find crap to upgrade my workbench, and I can’t, or I don’t have enough room in my storage at the shelter to keep it because of all the nonsense I started with. So I die of starvation. The drops on easy, aren’t any better. I just die slower. I’ll keep playing I see if it’s just my luck. But as for now, this is my review.

Buggy, but massively addictive

Mon Sep 16 2019 c137tparker

I have effortlessly put over 40 hours into this game, with less friction than many big RPG titles. The gameplay is addictive and has such a huge variety of things to do, it just clicks perfectly with me. It’s very buggy, but no major catastrophes happened. There were more than a few hilarious surprises in store for me. Let’s just say, be sure your new recruits get out of the vault every once in a while! You don’t want them to get too stir crazy. I will say that once you get pretty stabilized and into a rhythm the game starts to get a bit tedious, because truly there is no ultimate goal other than to survive as long as you can. Once you get past day 200 or 250 you’ll probably get bored, but it takes quite a while to get to that point and I think the cost of this game is more than worth the many hours of entertainment it provides. The only caution I would give is that it can be pretty difficult at the beginning to get your shelter established. Be sure to focus on collecting water as much as you can in the beginning, and realize that you need to be pretty much constantly sending people out to gather supplies at the start. There are many excellent guides online to help you out if need be. Have fun!

Nice Game ..But

Wed Apr 04 2018 EagleAt755

The game plays fairly well, but seems too busy at times. The controls don’t always work well - I couldn’t bury a pet because the option showed once and then wouldn’t show again. The words mention recycling parts, but no item to do so. I’ve been playing easy mode for a while now. Can’t get beyond day 15 without all or most players starving. If there’s a steady supply of food somewhere, I haven’t found it. There are plenty of resources, but not food., plenty of traders, but not food, etc. I like the concept. Balancing player traits doesn’t amount to much without a food supply. ***** Seems only fair to say that I did get past day 15. We need water to go places, traps if we get stuck at home. But harvesting needs a freezer, that we can’t build without parts, etc. Get the parts by using the radio to bring traders, etc. The only drawback now seems that the game seems to go on forever, and eleven people in a shelter at once seems too much to manage. But if we dismiss recruits they wil damage our stuff, etc. The interfaces overlap so that people and items block each other. ******* Some parts of this game are not player friendly. Players stand in front of each other, so we can’t just tap them. On the trail, and at the shelter, players ask to join but the game doesn’t check to see if the shelter is already at max. So if we say yes, players suffocate. But if we say no at the shelter recruits damage our stuff. Likewise, if we dismiss a weak player to get a strong player, the player dismissed damages our stuff. When we open storage, the scroll fearure doesn’t work, so we can’t see all our stored items. A constant need to accept transmissions from expeditions is just a waste of time; adds simply nothing to the game.

I wanted to enjoy it...

Fri Oct 05 2018 OSBastard

I really wanted to enjoy this game. I liked the basic premise and flavor. However I kept encountering a lot of situations which left me feeling lukewarm. The touch interface doesn’t seem very optimal, as I frequently struggled to correctly tap onto my target within the shelter. I was often left frustrated as I sent my survivors moving around the shelter instead of acting on my intended target. And rearranging the shelter feels like a chore, with it being very easy to drag unintended items out of place. This plus a lack of any sort of “snap” system makes it difficult to get items in place without wasting space. I also felt that trying to keep all of my survivors doing something productive ( beyond consuming resources ) to be very tedious. I would have loved being able to automate survivors to seek out a task they could perform, such as repairing items or utilizing training items. A lack of certain macro-management tools was also a downer. There is no single list to show a summary of survivors and their statuses. Finally a lot of interactions lacked real flavor. All of the “quests” I encountered are short and predictable. Traders could only ever seem to care about lights, toys, books, and the idea that there might be vehicle parts out there. There also appeared to be no long-term consequences to choosing to fight or not in terms of forming potential relationships with factions. All in all, I wouldn’t look to this game to be the most fulfilling experience you ever had.

Great idea, frustrating controls

Thu Nov 22 2018 Maksiik

This game lies somewhere between the “tap-to-solve-crisis” cartoonishness of Fallout Shelter and the “search for sticks before you can make a fire, or animals will eat your food while you sleep” detail of Day R. Which sounds great, but falls flat due to control and UI issues. The shelter itself becomes like those “hunt-the-pixel” adventure games where it takes you longer to find the exact bit of scenery you have to tap to feed the dog than to actually feed the dog. Similarly, it takes constant tapping to figure out what bits of the shelter need maintenance, which characters need what care, and which are getting critical. But the most frustrating aspect is the inventory system of Minecraft style “slots” where a single nail takes up one slot, same as 5 canisters of gasoline. (Makes sense-right? Day R’s “weight” system was immensely better!) As a result of this system, you get stuck in trading and scavenging (and even “coming home”) situations where you spend more time figuring out how to stack your stuff than doing the actual exploration. Have you heard of this great invention called “the ground” where you can “put down” stuff and come back for it later? Similarly, the idea of family members having time to just sort of stand there is weird. While Day R perfectly nails the immense percentage of time needed to gather, prepare and preserve food (especially for a family of 4!), this game sort of glosses over that aspect and makes it about Minecraft-style tool tinkering instead. Please release a free trial version so people can find this out without paying money.

Imagine Fallout Shelter without the micro-transactions

Sat Nov 30 2019 Hanzhe

If you acknowledged Fallout Shelter was an absurd cash grab with micro-transactions and artificially bloated wait times, Sheltered is the game you actually wanted. Its super fun, with a high learning curve. Things that could make the game better: -Have a mechanism for quickly setting the number for how many items you want to move from one menu box to another. When it gets to high-volume trades, moving 50 items one-by-one gets irritating. -Add an automatic maintenance bot. Once you have all the tools and 5+ shelter inhabitants, the fear of something breaking down are more of an inconvenience than an actual threat to the shelter. At that stage, it makes sense to offload the responsibility to a bot, so the player can concentrate on missions. -Add a higher-stakes plot that the player can engage in once they’re locked and loaded with the best stuff. The current “Yay! You can start over!” is kind of lame. -Force the player to take the offensive once the defensive measures are adequate for steamrolling would-be raiders. -I got the impression from some of the character designs that people and creatures were mutating over time... which would be totally awesome if that was actually the case.

Very nice

Mon Apr 02 2018 So be meekdnccjldksdncn

I like the aspect of balancing water consumption, food regulation, as well as keeping machines functioning and upgrading them. It is however rather difficult to completely understand all of the aspects such as the purpose of some items as well as how certain stats such as charisma affect the game (although it is fairly obvious). You have to make decisions on what to take and what to leave, make the most out of a gas mask and keep each person happy. You may need to watch a video or two, maybe read a guide to an item you don’t get. Additionally, reading each item for an idea instead of having a tutorial to outline the basics is difficult. Otherwise, the game is very solid and is comparable to this war of mine or fallout shelter.