🪓 This Week in Survival

🐴 HumanitZ
The newest patch just dropped with a bunch of fixes and additions. First and foremost- I think the game is worth a pickup – especially when it’s on sale, like it is currently. It’s not terribly intricate and I think the eventual stumbling block is going to be the fixed map- once you’ve memorized locations, it makes it less of an experience and more of a shopping list/to do list of actions. But for the patch- good stuff overall, but let me SAY IT LOUDER for the people in the back: horses > cars in most survival games. Quick and dirty thoughts on why:

👍 Like: Transportation! Who doesn’t love transportation. I wouldn’t want to walk from NY to OH and, while I wish my immediate neighborhood was more walkable, the lack of stores makes it less so. Also, I like horses.

⚠️ Wary: Adding an abundance of transportation, adding overpowered transportation, adding transportation with little or no cost – cost being defined both as effort and material/money- has a habit of bushwhacking the impact of some mechanics and restrictions. This is mostly in reference to the cars already in the game, not the addition of horses to the game.

🤔 Why: Few games end up including vehicles with the proper sense of gravitas. Joke. But seriously, too many games just chuck vehicles in and allow them to invalidate the entire setup. (Mental image: Oprah with her AND YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, EVERYONE GETS CARS.) First, to attend to the reality, are we to believe that your loot is mega scarce, you can’t find bandages, but no one found this completely intact car with a full tank? Or – if they had seen it- it was somehow not relevant to their survival but it’s peachy keen for yours. If the game has mechanics applied to locomotion or inventory – weight restrictions, slot/bag limits, energy or sleep system- you can typically just toss that shit in the trash because it’s time for feet no more, you’ve got a CAR!

Now, yes, caveat- not all games do this and I’d like to highlight both DayZ and SCUM for their handling of vehicles. While you can frequently find the body of a car, getting the tires and associated pieces back to that body can end up a huge undertaking, especially in DayZ where the tires mostly end up being hand carried. Often at a great distance. Sure in HumanitZ you have to add multiple components to the car to get it to run, but 1- they’re typically easily thrown into a bag and 2- in some locations, there are SO MANY cars that you can just ferry parts back and forth between them. Even the overabundance of car bodies is a detriment, because it’s free and plentiful storage space – turning survivors into Storage Wars contenders relatively quickly.

By tying transportation to a horse, you’re imposing a great set of restrictions. They could function under similar energy or performance limitations, they could have restricted carry ability, they can require food and safety- alongside other upkeep- similar to the player. (Which, btw, is another thing cars are used for – blithely mowing down threats, which are now largely unthreatening.)

🧟‍♀️ Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days
Launched into Early Access this week. Interesting concept, solid vibes, solid demo, but I’m waiting to see more of the roadmap actually implemented before diving in. With my current backlog, $24 feels like a bit much for what’s there right now. On paper, the game describes itself as:

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a side-scrolling shelter survival game that tasks you with guiding a desperate group of zombie apocalypse survivors to safety. Craft weapons, scavenge resources, balance your group’s needs, and try to get everyone out of danger alive.

👍 Like: Through demo gameplay, I felt like State of Decay 2 had a baby with mechanics from This War of Mine and then sprinkled on more – and more – zombies for flavoring. I liked the demo, I thought it was a quirky take at this whole “survival in a bottle” type game – This War of Mine, Fallout Shelter– where much of your life occurs within the flattened four walls of a base and you’re making these forays out for supplies. And death.

🤔 Why: For the price tag and the content, I think I’ll wait. Maybe if it had dropped onto my Switch, my handheld mindless entertainment, I could get behind the short gameplay cycle. I think right now I’d prefer to wait for the addition of more mechanical depth. The roadmap, assuming they follow it closely, looks solid- I’m looking forward to: environmental/world events impacting the shelter, a deeper injury and trauma recovery system, disease, weather and environmental effects, new zombie behavior and other intricate systems. Assuming we get delivery of everything suggested, this will shape up to be an awesome and solid example of the post-apocalyptic zombie survival game.

🎮 Triple-i Interactive Showcase
This event seemed split between action-heavy and then a ton of pixel games. (Or at least it seemed like a huge amount of pixel games that remind me of Stardew.) A few games caught my eye—some even pretending to be survivalish. (STILL WORKING ON TERMS)
In no particular order :

• The Alters (definitely sniffing around survival themes/an interesting take on survival)
• Into the Fire keeps trying to bill itself as a ‘disaster extraction survival’, but Steam users keep -appropriately- course correcting the user tags to reflect more specific genres/tags
• As someone planning to start overnight camping in their Subaru AND as someone that loved the art style of Firewatch, Over the Hill is super intriguing to me.
• Outbound is another title leaning into the idea of ‘get in your vehicle and get out there!’ Not survival, more of a cozy-life world exploration and crafting game. I was provided with a key to access the Alpha, going live April 14th, and I’m looking forward to checking it out!
• Frostrail is supposed to be an ‘open world survival FPS’ and I have thoughts about this application of survival to FPS games, the same way I have thoughts about applying it to horror titles. But I won’t rant on that here, so there ya go.

Anyone else spot something that stood out? Steam created this handy list of Games/DLC featured.

I’ve got a short list of keys and demos I want to jump into this weekend, BUT it’s also finally sunny/not an endless bog of storms & rain- so I may go hiking instead.