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Impressions: Enshrouded 1.0
After 118 hours of Valheim, it’s time for me to play the games I should be playing find another survival crafting game. Enshrouded 1.0 it is!
About two years ago, I was pretty down on Enshrouded generally. At the time, I had just came off of Nightingale, which expanded the boundaries of the survival crafting envelope in interesting ways. Enshrouded… did not. At least, not visibly. Coming back into Enshrouded after half a dozen updates and the 1.0 release, I was cautiously optimistic.
The results after 30 hours are… inconclusive.
I have rewritten this post four times already, oscillating between “X but worse” and “doing its own thing.” For example, the game has a lot of “Valheim but worse” vibes. There are light attacks and heavy attacks and a dodge/parry mechanic with bonus break/overpower; there are food buffs you can stack as long as they are different; it is important to be both rested and not wet. However, it is also very much not like Valheim in an arguably larger amount of ways. You can fast travel at any time you are not actively in the Shroud; there are no building physics, and you can easily have floating bases; there are XP and levels and skill trees and random loot and gem enhancements. So… closer to an Action RPG then? Yeah, maybe. But it does have the slower things, attacks are limited to like four buttons, and some rather cleverly hidden treasure chests (etc).
What I can confidently say is that if you come into Enshrouded with expectations, you will be disappointed. If you don’t, you won’t. Probably.
For myself, I am in the “no longer disappointed” category. It took a while to get here. One consistent bit of friction is how much of the gameplay seemingly revolves around stopping the flow and returning back to your base. Item durability is awful, your bag space is limited considering the various amount of bits it gets stuffed with, and pretty much everything seems designed around doing something, porting home to offload, and then porting back and doing something else. I suppose you could technically ignore some of those things by deleting resources instead of hoarding everything, and also bringing a Workbench with you for repairs when you plop down a new “base” (which creates a spawn/teleport point). Or, you know, just turn off durability altogether in the Settings menu.
Having said that, Enshrouded is gorgeous. The lighting, the terrain, the fine details in the grass, enshroomed Shrouded areas, the caves, the skyboxes, all of it. The vistas are particularly amazing, and even more so for the fact that you can actually travel to everything that you can see. This is less unique in 2026 than it was in Skyrim – you can go everywhere in Valheim and Palworld and ARK too – but it is still appreciated.
Also, the music is extremely good. It’s sweeping when you need to be swept, claustrophobic when claustroed, and segues smoothly between each. I especially like how the voiceover for the notes you find will pause once you get in combat. There are some games that won’t, or will start the whole thing over again, or other annoying variations.
Anyway, that’s Enshrouded thus far. I’m going to continue playing as long as I’m experiencing a nominal amount of fun, but I’m not inclined to push through once the fun ends like I did with Valheim.
Valheim Complete
After a very long and otherwise boring final fight, I have been welcomed into the halls of Valhalla. I logged 47 hours in Valheim back in the pre-Mistlands Early Access dayd, so that puts me at… 118 hours played in 1.0 from a fresh start to the victory lap home at the end of (in-game) Day 250.
To provide some necessary context, I played Valheim with zero mods. However, I did change resource drops to 1.5x, the Death Penalty to Casual (keep equipped items), and Portals set to allow all items (which includes metal). Per the game notes, that last option “circumvents the progression and exploration of the world as it is intended.” Which is kind of hilarious in the context of the game already taking 118 hours to beat, let alone how much more time it would take having to sail across the world with a ship full of iron ore every time.
Actually, this is something I want to talk about in finer detail.
In case you haven’t played Valheim… well, why the hell are you reading this post? Anyway, here’s the deal: fairly early after you defeat the first boss, you unlock the ability to craft portals. Plop one down, give it a unique name, then go exploring wherever and plop down a second portal, give it the same unique name, and bam. Instant teleportation between those two points. The rub is that both metal ore and metal ingots cannot go through the portal; if either of those things are in your inventory, the portal simply does not work. If you commit to a single mega-base, that means every ore run requires you to travel by cart or boat all the way back the hard way. Alternatively, you could theoretically set up a series of forward operating bases (FOBs) in each biome, smelting and crafting any new ores onsite. Ore/Ingots are bad, but finished weapons or armor is fine.
Back in Early Access, I did play the “intended” way, largely because I don’t think there was another option. It works to a point. The logistical trouble comes later on, when you are no longer on the same continent as your primary base. As the tiers progress, you can’t just slap down a Forge or Workbench and build the latest gear. Instead, you are going to need to craft ancillary furniture like Forge Bellows or a Grinding Wheel to “level up” the Forge and unlock new recipes. And this furniture requires older resources like Copper or Chain (etc), which means you either need to bring some with you from your stash, or go raid earlier biomes on the new continent, which means potentially more FOBs, and so on.
What you will notice is that none of this is particular hard. Or tricky. Or mentally challenging whatsoever. There is the constant fear of death, as by default you drop literally everything on your person. Were you deep in hostile territory and not yet plopped down a destination portal? Well, good luck! You can attempt the classical corpse run to retrieve your gear, and Valheim actually throws you a bone with a massive damage reduction upon picking up your stuff… but it does so mostly because it still requires you to equip the gear, which is not instant.
I actually played with the default Death Penalty in this 1.0 run, up until I got to the Mountain biome. Up there, the cold deals damage every second unless you have Frost Resistance from a cape or Mead consumable. So, I died and dropped all my best gear, did a corpse run with a belly full of Mead and second best gear, died again, and… realized that I had nothing else. No more gear, no more Mead. I would either have to continue making corpse runs in the hopes of luring away the mobs loitering around my corpse – which is totally an extra “fuck you” the devs put in – or practically start back over with sticks and stones. Eventually, I did “corpse hop” enough to get my original gear down the mountain, but I thereafter reduced the penalty to the lowest setting. Which still does drop everything but your equipped armor and whatever you were actively using in your hand, but at least it is not as (emotionally) devastating.
Nevertheless, even a default death penalty is a solvable problem: by outrageous, repetitive, mind-numbing grinding. Unlock that newest tier of gear and craft a set? Great! Now craft another full set or three. Pepper the landscape in FOBs and portals until you need an Excel sheet to document your portal naming conventions. You can type stuff on the map itself, if you can stand the clutter.
The bottom line is that the “intended” way of playing Valheim is apparently only for those who enjoy spending 500 hours playing the equivalent of an extraction shooter.
Or, hear me out: playing with other people.
Bosses gain more HP when multiple players are around, but know what doesn’t scale up? The fact that more players equals more carry weight, more inventory slots, more simultaneous boats, more help defeating mobs guarding your corpse. Sure, technically more players means twice as many meals and ingots need to be farmed as normal. But you probably don’t need each player to have 2+ suits of backup gear because the odds of both (or all) players go down is lower. Also, division of labor means that someone else can be crafting or cooking at home while others are out gathering resources. Everything is easier.
That is a whole lot of words to seemingly justify my difficulty slider decisions, in what is technically a single-player game. What I wanted to point out is that I actually appreciated the design vision the Valheim devs had for the game. I just don’t think the execution landed well in a solo world.
And, well, exploration kinda sucks in Valheim too; there are not very many unique POIs in the biomes, or secret biomes, or special gear, or any particular reason to suspect a particular Black Forest is any different than the last six Black Forests you walked through. You do technically get XP for killing mobs with specific weapons, but the practical effects each of each level up are hard to divine, and hardly matter anyway until you reach certain (invisible) breakpoints.
Anyway, I do give Valheim credit for some its systems, like keeping food/cooking important from Day 1 all the way to the endgame. The soundtrack is excellent, even though there is only like 1 song per biome. Combat feels weighty and important. There are a large variety of weapons and playstyles possible. The building system is fantastic and coherent. The Grappling Hook and Feather Cape combo is immensely satisfying.
At the same time, the survival crafting genre has gotten a lot more crowded in the intervening years. The old guard continue to get updates, and the newcomers bring genre-based Quality of Life improvements that practically poison the well. It’s 2026 and you can’t automatically pull mats from your chests? Or auto-sort them? There is something to be said about immersion, but conveniently no one is talking about going back to checkpoint-based saves or how you can repair gear for free even in Valheim. It all just feels very silly to ask the player to waddle across the floor with 1000 pounds of metal in their inventory just to preserve… what, exactly? The Viking magic? Meanwhile, I’ll be over here zipping around like Spiderman because it’s faster than traveling by boat, before getting to my Greydwarf spawner/Blood Magic farm outpost because actually raising the skill any legitimate way is almost impossible.
So, yeah, Valheim. It’s worth trying out if you’re a genre fan, but don’t feel bad if you don’t like it.
Valheim 1.0 – It’s All Coming Back
In another distraction from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I started back up the new Valheim 1.0.
Although I had previously played for apparently 46.7 hours, it had been such a long time since then that I had forgotten everything there was about Valheim. Well, almost everything. I remembered that you can’t build a camp fire inside of your hut, but that was about it. Seriously, it was Day 3 before I built up the courage to kill a boar, as I had imagined them being some tough enemy for which I would need to defeat with a bow. As it turns out, they die in almost one hit, and drop the material you needed to craft a bow. I must have been thinking about all those blog posts about Windrose…
After defeating the first boss and heading into the Black Forest, antler-pickaxe in hand, I started to feel the familiar shape of outrageous bullshit. I was able to find Tin ore along the coastlines fairly quickly. Copper took a lot longer, as I had forgotten what it looked like (mossy boulder identical to other mossy boulders). Neither of the resources would do me any good though, without the red cubes inside the Burial Mounds. Which are in the Black Forest. Just not in any of your Black Forests.
I already linked them, but in my prior Valheim experience, I had to “explore” and essentially discard five Swamps and seven Mountains before finding those biome-specific resources. So, I guess hitting up seven different Black Forests in 1.0 is still par for the course. Fantastic. I suppose I should count myself lucky that any Burial Mounds spawned on my starting island at all; I have heard tale of people having to sail to new lands on the slow, beginning raft just to smelt ore.
It’s just ridiculously frustrating in what feels like a genuinely unique way. If I’m playing Terraria or Minecraft or ARK or whatever else, I’m not expecting Copper Nodes in the very first rock I crack open, or even the first place I look. In that respect, searching forever and then finding literally five Burial Mounds within 100 feet of each other is not a completely uncommon genre staple. The key difference with Valheim then is… well, the outrageous slog of it all. Playing Terraria is fun and engaging. Running/walking through environments, avoiding all combat because it’s pointless, is not.
And actually, I’m finding combat almost entirely unavoidable. Things might be different now that I have decked myself out in troll-skin armor (raises Sneakiness), but smaller mobs in Valheim don’t ever appear to leash or otherwise de-aggro. Found that out the hard way, several times, while spending in-game days looking for Burial Mounds. Nope, you need to stop what you are doing and defeat every trash mob you encounter and throw away its pointless loot, lest you get caught on some logs or stumble into a spawning nest.
Again, I’m not necessarily asking for a chicken in every pot. It would probably be a very short game if you found the dungeon at the entrance of the every new biome you walked into. But I am not exactly sure that the way Valheim handles exploration overall is especially fun. Specifically, the overland part. Sailing is it’s own thing, and I can see the fun in provisioning for adventure, setting up return portals, the tension between moving your entire base versus setting up outposts, etc. Running around by foot is just running around. That and the godawful trash mobs, which will only grow more annoying, I know.
We’ll see how it goes. This initial (re-)experience was very bad, but now that I have a Smelter and am (slowly) cranking out Bronze ingots? I having some… if not fun, at least some satisfaction. Copper/Tin/Bronze opened up so many recipes that I am slowly planning out my upgrades, testing new weapons, and spending some time improving my Viking crib. Which you wouldn’t necessarily notice just looking at it, but that’s because I’m giving it the old college try before following a base build video.
I recall the Swamp being a relatively miserable experience, and that’s what I have to look forward to after defeating the boss of the Black Forest. Then comes Mountains, which I believe was fine. Then… the Plains? Mosquitoland? Never actually quested in there after finishing the Mountains, so that will be all new. Assuming I make it. Which I probably will. Maybe.
7 Days to Die – Undead Legacy
Undead Legacy is a complete overhaul mod for 7 Days to Die (7DTD) that got a massive update after about four years of radio silence. Much like with Darkness Falls or Rebirth, the goal of overhaul mods is to take the very solid (zombie) bones from the base game and actually do something worthwhile with them. In the case of Undead Legacy though… well, I’m not exactly certain what is worthwhile here.
If you have never heard of it, Undead Legacy’s schtick is greatly slowing down the rate of progression within the game. That’s… basically it. This is achieved in a number of ways, including the introduction of a lot of intermediate crafting steps and additional item pieces and so on. For example, it took me six in-game days before I was able to craft a wooden cube. This does add a layer of immersion, as you can’t immediately go from punching trees to scaling the sides of buildings with wood frames you hand-crafted out of raw wood in your backpack like in vanilla. Doors also needing hinges to craft, etc.
The problem is that this feeds into the overcorrection The Fun Pimps have been taking for years.
Once upon a time, 7 Days to Die is/was a survival crafting game. At some point though, the devs decided they wanted the game to be more of a looter shooter. This is why almost 100% of the Points of Interest (POIs) are no longer just buildings or houses, but micro-dungeons with defined paths and invisible triggers that spawn in zombies. In the past, you could be almost entirely self-sufficient in the forest somewhere, digging for Iron ore and building a castle out of cobblestones. Today, you have to find enough magazines from active looting to unlock any technology at all. It is technically possible to find a balance in the craft vs loot debate, but it is a fine line to walk.
Unfortunately, Undead Legacy’s principle design of “slowing progression” specifically pushes it even more into looter shooter territory. Making crafting the most basic wooden house a painful grind simply means you are encouraged to take over an existing POI instead. Is crafting anything beyond a Primitive Bow too difficult? Don’t worry, just randomly loot an AK-47 in any of the several dozen POIs you are raiding. Being able to repair these weapons may be a challenge, but you almost don’t care, because by spending 100% of your time looting, the crafting progression will almost passively take care of itself.
Was this the intention? Did the overhaul’s author really just have it out for players being able to turn cars into machetes instead of praying for RNG loot gods to smile upon them instead? There is indeed less cheese in the game, such as nerd-poling and throwing hatches in doorways to confuse the zombie AI. On the other hand, there is still plenty of cheese, like being able to pick up most every object, including cardboard boxes… that you can nerd-pole with instead.
Anyway, there are other changes Undead Legacy brings, but they are largely irrelevant. Level-ups let you select nodes in a Path of Exile-esque skill bush, but almost all of them are extremely boring +5% to whatever. “Learn by Doing is back!” If by “learn” you mean eventually unlocking +5% to whatever by using Polearms a bunch. Research looks like a tech tree now, but it just hides the fact that instead of reading magazines, you scrap them for Research Points that you spend – along with a bunch of other resources! – to individually unlock recipes.
Undead Legacy just feels like a giant drag. Which, I guess is what the author was going for?
Give it a whirl if you want, but this overhaul is a 0/10 for me. Play Darkness Falls or Rebirth instead.
Impressions: Palworld, 1.0
It’s been about 2.5 years since I last touched Palworld. With its 1.0 release, it felt finally time to go back.
TL;DR: I haven’t booted up Hearthstone or Guild Wars 2 a single time since, not even for weekly quests.
I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about changes, as I only played around eight hours back in like… v0.12 or whatever. What I can confirm, broadly speaking, is that the game pretty much plays like it did 2.5 years ago, minus the bugs. All of these impressions are coming from around ~30 hours of game time on default, Normal settings.
The gameplay loop is the same with ARK: explore a defined map, grind resources, capture creatures, repeat. The big difference is that Pals are much more inherently useful in all aspects of the game. You can summon Pals to help you fight/tame other Pals. You can summon Pals and then ride on them over land, sea, and/or air. You can summon Pals and utilize them as living flamethrowers, grenade launchers, miniguns, or even as swords. Crucially, you can deploy Pals in your base to farm resources, craft ammo, plant/harvest crops, and otherwise keep you company. And because Pals can be useful for all of these different scenarios, you are encouraged to capture all of them in the off-chance they are better at a given task than what you have, rather than just the completionist “gotta catch them all” achievement.
The actual act of playing the game has been an interesting experience for me. Palworld very much feels like a AA game… which it is, with MSRP of $30. The title screen, the menus, some of the textures all kinda scream “stock Unreal assets.” More than that though, some red flags immediately raised to me when I discovered that the first resource after Wood was just “Ore.” Not Copper Ore, not Iron Ore, just… Ore. In the past I have railed on designers having excessively prescriptive design, e.g. Copper Sword, Iron Sword, Silver Sword, etc. Palworld does have other tiers of items, like Refined Ore and others, but having “Ore” the baseline was indicative of an overall balance towards volume than rarity. Which is indeed how it has played out thus far.
What I do appreciate (to a degree) is how many different activities are available in the game. There are faction bases that you can attack in the open world, which gives you some loot. There are instanced dungeons, which contain some Pals and resources that only spawn inside. There are open-world “bosses” that are effectively super-charged Pals. Base raids are a thing, unless you either pay the messenger for them to go away or turn them off in the menu. There is also Fishing, which can net you some nice rewards and high-level Pals. Respawning treasure chests are strewn about in the land. In short, there are plenty of distractions when exploring, such that you may end up not actually accomplishing the thing you set out to do, unless you are able to ignore everything else.
In short, Palworld is great! For now. I can imagine a scenario in which some of these activities get old after a while, in which case the loop collapses. I also find it difficult to imagine replaying the game later, since the map isn’t procedurally generated. I believe there is an option to randomize the Pal locations, but I’m not certain how much extra juice that will provide. Best-case scenario would be for there to be ongoing support, ARK-style, with perhaps new maps eventually, whether created by Pocket Pair themselves or dedicated modders.
Then again, there is something to be said for having an experience that is just over when you’re done.
Un-Necesse-ary
Necesse recently graduated from Early Access to full 1.0 release. I had played it previously for almost 10 hours, so I wanted to give it another go to see what had improved. As it turns out… not much.
I’ve heard the game described as “top-down Terraria meets RimWorld,” but that is criminally misleading. Yes, it is a top-down, open-world survival crafting game with RimWorld-esque colony management functions. But what it’s actually more like is a lower-budget Keplerth. Now, in my Impressions of that game I called it a knockoff Necesse, so there’s some circular referencing going on.
The point is to not go into Necesse thinking you are going to get the same tight, engaging gameplay loops of Terraria or… like anything at all related to RimWorld’s subtle genius. The NPCs you recruit to your village can be assigned tasks like chopping wood or shearing sheep, but they have zero personality, relevant moods, or any necessary functionality at all. Hell, most of the crafting you can do is itself pointless in comparison to random drops.
OK, let’s back up. What’s Necesse and its gameplay loop?
In Necesse, there is a large overworld with various creatures and hazards and biomes to explore. Additionally, there is an underground “layer” full of much more dangerous monsters and random loot. The loose goal is for you to summon bosses using specific item drops, defeat them, and use the resulting drops to unlock the next tier of progression. As you might expect with the top-down perspective, most of the bosses are bullet-hell style affairs with multiple phases.
There is crafting in Necesse, but it feels largely perfunctory and unsatisfactory. Yes, you can collect wood to make a Wood Sword, smelt copper into copper ingots to make a Copper Sword, and so on. You can also just buy weapons from NPCs too, skipping multiple tiers in the process. Indeed, the underground portions of the game feature loads of enemies that have a chance of dropping gear that vastly outstrips anything you could reasonably craft. So, rather than feeling like you are earning your way through escalating challenges, most of the time you are better off just running around under-geared until you very suddenly are not.
There is technically hunger in Necesse, but it is the sort of half-baked nonsense that is unfortunately typical in this space. Are there dozens of food recipes? Yes. Are any of them necessary at all? No. More complicated dishes can grant you larger bonuses to damage (etc) and you can even automate some of the cooking via the NPCs you recruit to your base. But… why? Just eat a bunch of coconuts or berries or whatever else is nearby. Perhaps this sort of thing becomes more required on higher difficulties. It all just feels rote, like designers going through the same motions just because “everyone” builds games this way. It’s 2025, guys: if food isn’t going to be super-scarce resource, then it needs to have a more integrated game function (increasing HP, etc) ala Valheim or similar. Otherwise, just leave it out.
To an extent, it’s a bit unfair to be too harsh on Necesse considering it was largely developed by one dude. Counter-point: Stardew Valley. Also: maybe it’s worth bringing on more people to make the game more engaging? There was a graphics overhaul at one point, which certainly improved things, but the UI itself is still hot garbage. Could they make the icons even tinier? [Fake Edit:] Just found the option for UI scale, but it still looks bad even when scaled up.
Anyway, that’s Necesse.
Old Man’s Sky
They just keep bringing me back, don’t they?
If you haven’t heard the news, No Man’s Sky (NMS) recently released yet another massive free update to the game. This time around, you can build a corvette-class ship that will allow you to… get up and walk around in your ship. That might not sound like much, but it is actually kind of rare even in space games, especially considering you do so with no loading screens. In any case, I decided I need to give things another go after 5 (five!) years.
What I encountered was still one of the worst opening sequences for almost any game.
I apparently have never commented on it before, but NMS starts with you awakening on an alien planet, your suit powering up, and then a number of warnings about your environmental protection waning. Conceptually, this is fine; other survival games start you out in imminent danger too. For example, ARK has you awakening on a beach and sometimes being eaten by a raptor right away. In NMS’s case though, it just feels… bad. Your visor scanner doesn’t work, sometimes you don’t spawn near required resources to refill your environmental protection, and you don’t have the terrain modification gun yet which otherwise trivializes most hostile weather (e.g. dig a tunnel and get underground).
Worse, I actually tried starting things back up by immediately choosing an Expedition. Big mistake. Expeditions were added to the game several patches ago, and they are basically more focused experiences where you start out on predefined planets and need to accomplish specific goals. The problem is that these are absolutely tuned more for advanced players with a good grasp of the underlying mechanics. Well, and the other problem is that everyone is thrown into the same subsets of planets, so you might spawn in an area where everyone has mined most of the nearby ore. More annoyingly to me though, is that when you are looking around for resources, you’re bombarded with dozens of (useless) player base icons, making finding things difficult.
So, yeah, don’t do what I did. Instead, get a foothold in the game and then go into an Expedition – including bringing some good loot in with you! – via a vendor you unlock a few hours in the game.
In any case, since I hate myself, I chose to start a brand new save on Survival difficulty. C’mon, I had 130+ hours logged already, right? Beginning is brutal, as mentioned, and you have to contend with some extra nonsense like smaller stack sizes for material, etc. Within about 15 hours though, I’m back to having 22 million units, 6000 nanites, and unlocking all 10 freighter storage racks.
No Man’s Sky has indeed improved tremendously over the years, but fundamentally it does still have a problem with “but… why?” It’s the same place I landed on five years ago, and unfortunately it does not appear much has changed. Well, OK, there have been a lot of changes. Expeditions, there are now Dissonant planets with corrupted Sentinels, there is a Settlement system, Pirate Dreadnaughts to fight/own, the new bespoke Corvette-class ship building system, and so on.
Fundamentally, though? When you’re on foot, none of the randomly-generated creatures matter; only Sentinels pose any threat whatsoever, and there are only like a half-dozen types. Why even have so many different kinds of weapons for your multi-tool if only one is needed to take down every enemy? Meanwhile, if you spend more than 30 seconds in space, you’re likely to be accosted by fleets of hostile pirates that will absolutely murder you if given half a chance. The space gameplay “loop” is not particularly deep, but nevertheless feels miles more complete than what you are doing in the other 80% of the game, e.g. walking on planets.
Having said all that… yeah, 130+ hours plus however many I muster this time around. I’m harsh on the game because I’m mad. Hello Games have added so much and just inexplicably left such a gaping hole in the center and I don’t understand why. Maybe having Gek pirates running around on foot blasting you would feel too weird or whatever, but apparently it’s fine when they’re faceless ships? OK, just use some of the six trillion randomized alien creatures and make some of them require that fancy mech to fight! Or lean more into those bug aliens that are apparently as ubiquitous as the Sentinels for (presumably) some kind of lore reason.
Or, I guess, ignore all that and hurry up and give me Light No Fire.
Abiotic Factor is Incredible
Whatever plans I had for Blaugust (read: none) these past weeks evaporated in the furnace of fun that is Abiotic Factor. I played about 18 hours worth a year ago and stopped because I was having too much fun, and wanted to wait until the complete experience was available. Well, it’s here, and I currently have… 130 hours logged. Not even counting the original 18. Jesus Christ.
If you are link-averse, Abiotic Factor is essentially a closed-world survival-crafting game set in a SCP meets Half-Life-like setting with a similar plot. I mentioned “closed-world” instead of “linear” earlier because while the game does have an generally predefined path – as opposed to something like ARK – you get to unlock doors and open up shortcuts that will make backtracking more convenient. And there is indeed some backtracking required to collect additional resources to fuel your science machine.
I have found that the way resources are handled is… mostly acceptable. Just about everything in the facility can be stripped down for parts, but once they are gone, they are gone. In the meantime, you will find portals to various “anteverses” that you need to explore and complete. These portals are similar to the general facility in that they are more linear but you can unlock shortcuts for subsequent visits. Emphasis on subsequent visits. Twice every in-game week all portals reset themselves, including any items therein. To an extent, this does lend itself towards a sort of resource speed-run that gets tiresome after a while, especially when you’re looking for just one particular thing (Staplers, Glue, etc).
On the other hand: what other survival-crafting game doesn’t require farming some resources?
One element I have been surprised about is how well the devs maintained a sense of positive progression. In the beginning, the night is indeed dark and full of terrors – electricity is shut off, hostile security bots patrol, and you’re mostly sitting in the corner somewhere praying the noises of unknown source will just stop. After a while, you learn how to craft batteries and traps and makeshift barriers, creating a safe(r) space for yourself. Exploring further afield leads to longer return trips, which sucks. Then you make a cart, where you can stack your loot and push it back to base. Or you unlock a particularly helpful shortcut cutting down on the commute. You start creating forward bases instead of bringing everything with you. Finally, slightly past the mid-game… absolute bliss. Let’s just say you still need to explore new areas, but returning somewhere is no longer a problem.
At the same time, the general lethality of the game remains high even on Normal difficulty. You can be well armed and provisioned, but some enemies will still be able to take you out in short order. In the endgame where I am, some of the enemies have become a bit bullet-spongy too, but I’m not too mad about it because the difficulty of each encounter is largely in your hands. Having trouble clearing a room? How about setting up a bunch of turrets in the doorway and let them duke it out instead of you? There are power sockets in a bunch of places in the facility, and even if there aren’t, you can always bring your own fully-charged batteries. While not quite on the level of Prey, Abiotic Factor does give you a similar level of freedom.
On the negative side, the game is not afraid of sometimes setting you up against (mostly) invulnerable enemies. Usually these act more as mobile traps/hazards, but a not insignificant portion of the game is spent being stalked by the equivalent of a Boo from Mario. It’s spooky and provides plenty of dynamic jump scare opportunities at first… and then the game keeps going for another 20 hours before you get something that can grant you peace. But surprise! There’s another at the endgame. Sigh.
Another downside comes from some lingering rough edges from Early Access. The devs have been very quick with hotfixes to patch various bugs, which is great. But there are some things that need some more love, or semblance of purpose. For example, there are several dozen cooking recipes with complex/rare ingredients that barely provide more sustenance than basic ones. Some weapons serve no discernable purpose, being weaker than what you had access to before. There are several endgame Sharp weapons, but no Blunt ones. Speaking of which, the late game annoyingly introduces you to new weapons and then immediately enemies that are resistant to their damage. Like… why?
These are all fixable problems though, and the devs seem like reasonable people thus far. I’m excited to hear what they have in store for v1.1 and beyond. Mostly. Because at the end of the day, I am very clearly nearing the end of the game. Clocking more than 130 hours is certainly sufficient for my money’s worth, but I’m nevertheless sad that starting over is unlikely to generate the same novel experience. This is where a more traditional, rogue-like survival game (e.g. 7 Days to Die, Minecraft, etc) might pull ahead in the long-term.
Having said all that, well… one hundred and thirty goddamn hours. Abiotic Factor is legit. It’s one of the most novel survival-crafting experiences I have had since Subnautica, and reminded me why I love the genre so much. Play now or play later, but I recommend playing it. Also, it’s on Game Pass.
Impressions: Len’s Island
I try to keep tabs on every survival game that comes out as, despite first appearances, there ain’t actually that many. So, when I got notice several weeks ago that not only has Len’s Island came out of Early Access but was also free to play over the weekend, I quickly jumped aboard.
Unfortunately, after playing about 6 hours or so, the game is a bust.
The problem with Len’s Island is that it feels like an A game. As in, one less A than AA. Maybe BB would work better? This is the game’s own description on Steam:
An open-world survival crafting game for 1–8 players, blending intense dungeon crawling and ARPG combat with peaceful farming and creative building. Take on quests and explore a vast, procedurally-generated world full of danger and discovery.
Yeah, no, almost all of that is misleading as fuck. Imagine my surprise when I figured out that in this “open-world survival crafting game” you… can’t actually craft armor. Armor drops from the end chest in dungeons, but not in an ARPG, Diablo-ish way either – it’s a singular, set piece. The only other way to get armor is to purchase some from vendors, who also tie into your general tech/decoration progression. There are like four weapons in the game and you just upgrade them with identical sets of resources for each tier. Quests do exist, but they are achievement/milestone style quests rather than any kind of coherent narrative. Perhaps things get spicy later on, I dunno, but I very much doubt it.
I’m not really sure there is much else to say. The general gameplay is not fun, the survival elements are nonexistent, and crafting itself is perfunctory. I haven’t been this disappointed since Farworld Pioneers.
Valheim’s Subtle, Genius Design
Sep 30
Posted by Azuriel
I am going to complain about Valheim later, but before I do so, I wanted to get some words out in praise of some of its subtler elements of genius design. Specifically, there are two main elements: food and base-building. I’m going to talk about both as someone still in the Plains biome.
Counter-intuitively, in many survival-crafting games food is usually an afterthought. There might be a time period right at the beginning where you are scrounging for edibles anywhere you can, but thereafter hunger is just another meter you manage. Or more accurately, a meter you forget about completely until it is actively flashing at you. Certain “late-game” foods might provide specific buffs to damage or whatever, but it is clearly a bonus reward to encourage you to treat the design with more seriousness than it ever truly merits.
This is not at all the case with Valheim: your next meal is always top of mind at every stage of the game. And it achieves this, ironically, with no technical penalty for not eating. You will never starve to death in Valheim. Instead, you will… just have the default amount of HP and Stamina. Which is fine for a minute in the early game, but becomes a brutal setback nearly anywhere else.
In Valheim, you have three “slots” for food. Each piece of food grants you some amount of extra HP, Stamina, and healing per interval. However, you can’t just eat the same thing three times, as the food slots are mutually exclusive. This automatically elevates the food/cooking system way past almost all traditional survival crafting games, into the realm of Green Hell and similar ones that track individual macros like Protein and Carbs. Unlike the super technical ones though, Valheim doesn’t care if you eat the same three (unique) dishes each day, nor does it bear the same burden of UI overhead. Food just gives the same three stats in varying amounts, for varying amounts of time. Want to subsist on just Turnips and Onions and Onion Soup? Go for it… but good luck not getting one-shot in the next biome.
As a sidebar, I also appreciate what Valheim does (thus far) when it comes to obsoletion of materials as you progress. After defeating a boss, you typically unlock something that allows you to process the next biome’s materials, which you need in order to take on the next boss. That’s pretty standard. What has been nice though, is that food/equipment still makes use of older ingredients in fairly rational ways. Some might find this grindy to have to head back into the Swamp for Iron or Blood Bags or whatever, but I appreciate the (usually) measured approach of some items requiring older mats.
Finally, I want to talk about the meat (ahem) of the genius design: the campfire.
Real talk, Valheim slaughtered the sacred cow that almost every survival game raised without even knowing it, e.g. fires producing smoke. In almost every other game, you start by building a 2×2 box for a base, and throw everything inside… including the campfire. After all, rain will put a camp fire out, and you cannot fast-forward the night without being within a certain radius of a lit fire. In Valheim, however, unventilated fires also produce smoke, which creates a damaging debuff which can kill you.
And that’s it. One simple change elevates the game beyond many of its peers in the genre. Not because it’s realistic (it is), but because of what it changes about how the player approaches base design. My own progression went something like this:
It may not seem revolutionary that a game with Viking-themed set pieces ends up encouraging players to build Viking-looking bases. But consider how the genre’s bar for successfully encouraging anything beyond a wooden survival cube is practically nonexistent. The closest I have felt to such an inspired synergy between mechanics and aesthetics was Nightingale, which wore its Valheim inspirations on its lanternpunk sleeve.
In any case, my compliments to the devs on these two, specific points.
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Tags: Crafting, Fire is Hot, Game Design, Norse, Survival, Valheim