It is a walking sim in the literal sense, emphasis on the sim. In that you are actively massaging your controls, pulling triggers to maintain balance and keep from falling over. Scanning terrain for optimal paths, walking over these rocks, carefully going down that hill, picking up the pace when you can risk it, correcting when you push it too far, arranging all the cargo strapped to you so it doesn’t pull too much in any one direction. Finding paths and structures left by other players.
So you are always doing something when moving, which in most games would be just pushing a stick forward to get to a destination. It is actually pretty engaging.
It is not really similar at all to games like Gone Home, where you just wander around absorbing a story. There’s a lot more to this, and it is pretty cool. I mean it’s a Kojima game, and there’s not a lot else like it.
Yes, although for the most part what you’re exploring is moss covered outcroppings and snow covered mountains. There’s not an enormous variety of terrain, but it does have a desolate beauty.
Also, for the most part you know where you’re going to end up, in terms of a point on a map. The exploring is more about what you encounter along the way, and trying to find a navigable route to it (and, later, optimal placement for your transport infrastructure).
I’m about 15 hours in and on the second area. I’m beginning to find it a bit monotonous. It feels like all I’m doing is keeping the left stick pushed forward while your gear slowly degrades. All the bases/prepper huts are basically the same, stand at the console and listen to a hologram, get a new job and go do the exact same thing elsewhere. Are there any npc’s outside of cutscenes? It just feels really bare bones so far, like they created all this lore and story and then hastily cobbled together a game around it.
Don’t want to sound too harsh on it, it has some nice visuals and the voice acting seems good so far. There are some interesting characters (apart from the usual Kojima weirdness) and I’m probably going to give it a few more hours to see if I can find a groove with it. But so far it’s not grabbing me, unlike those bodies swimming around in the that tar stuff
Thanks for the help everyone. I ended up buying it from GMG for $24 this morning. So after I finish some current games up I’ll get to see if it clicks with me or not.
I am still picking away at this. I really enjoy the ambience, but I realized this morning that I wish it was a different game. I don’t actually want to deliver packages. That activity is repetitive and not really all that enjoyable, and I find myself going out of my way to restore roads, etc. to working order, and that’s when it hit me that I wish the game was less “delivery person simulator” and more “infrastructure restoration simulator,” and I think it would even tie into the games themes of connection better, too. Like, I want the game (or at least a game) to be about wandering into this post-apocalyptic land and laying down roads, putting up bridges, placing ladders and climbing anchors and then watching everyone else start to use them. Watching the signs of life come back to the world in the form of the porters becoming more numerous and carrying things to and fro, stocking the futher-flung outposts with materials so you can push the network out more, etc. I think that would be a lot more interesting, trying to figure out the best way to link up places and so forth without having to actually deliver the packages yourself.
I think they’re a bit of a bridge too far in that they trivialize traversal but I just wouldn’t want them in my hypothetical infrastructure rebuilder game.
Something I don’t really understand about roads is how I get likes for them. I’m pretty sure I have never once come across an already built road, and I can only assume that’s true for everyone, and yet I always get likes because “someone used my road”. When I drive on roads that I built, am I all unknowing passing out likes to other people for using “their” roads?
I’ve been playing this too, and made it to the second map last night. It’s definitely nothing like anything else I’ve played, and worth experiencing, though I don’t know if I love it enough to stick with it for another 40+ hours given the reputed length.
David Brin’s The Postman was one of my favorite books as a kid, so the premise of walking across a post-apocalyptic landscape to make deliveries and reconnect isolated pockets of civilization has a bit of extra resonance.
The lonely atmosphere has created some incredible moments, and I love how it’s picked up some of what worked so well in Breath of the Wild, in terms of making the landscape be a critical part of the game rather than just a pretty background. But I’m also already feeling the repetition of some of the tasks, and when the spell of the environment is broken, the mechanics can’t quite bear the full weight of maintaining interest.
It’s a good game for playing in small doses and just chilling out (except for the bits that aren’t chill at all). I have a huge tolerance, even a kind of love for Kojima’s Usual Guff when it comes to story, but this one doesn’t have it like the Metals Gear did, at least in my estimation. So far the story has been very unobtrusive (37 hours), but towards the end I guess it gets very much less so.
I just started playing this and, four hours in, I find it inexplicably compelling. I don’t really know what’s going on but it’s made me CARE about all of these people and care about helping them.
