NEO Scavenger

The game is great. Gameplay in refreshing and exciting, overall it's worth it's price. BUT... The game is an absolute mess to play on Linux. For some reason, the whole game is build on a Flash Player tech so it requires a lot, I mean A LOT of tinkering with your system before it can launch. I had to install around 15 libraries before the game was able to even attempt to open itself in a window (and then crashed anyway). Eventually, I just ran it in Wine. Disappointing, that even though this game claims to be able to run on Linux, it is far easier to emulate it.

Shuffling across the deserted landscape pushing a shopping trolley. Shivering in an abandoned mobile home, boiling river water in a soup can. Ecstatic at the discovery of a worn-out croc and discarding bullets so you can carry a cigarette lighter. The initial ambiance of NEO Scavenger is un-matched. It’s a true survival simulator where drinking dirty water can lead to slow death. Your starting attributes can help or hinder: botany helps identify edible or poisonous flora; trapping helps you fashion tools to assist in the wilderness. The mechanics for performing this are clunky but that feels appropriate. Combat is desperate, rolling around in the mud as you bash at each other with shards of glass or repurposed kitchenware. The ramifications of an untreated wound are infection and sepsis. Then, once you’ve just balanced your ability to survive, the world opens up and you come in contact with a semblance of civilisation. Eating your first cooked meal feels tangible, as does the bewilderment at interacting with non-rabid humans. Your quests, just a tick box in any other game, take on new weight as you take on supplies and equipment to journey once more into the wild. All this is from my opening impressions. However once you die again and again, especially from a random dog bite during a long run with much accumulated gear, the permadeath becomes frustrating. You’re forced to repeat the opening moments so often that they become routine, breaking the immersion. You recognise that some skills are indispensable, or that the RNG can basically demand a restart. This game is dying a checkpoint system- particularly once you reach the first settlement and story missions. Ultimately your harrowing opening experience is hindered without it.

I really like the role you are assigned in NEO Scavenger: you are just an ordinary human in a dangerous place, with no posessions, no weapons, no magic to save your life. Sneaking through the game world puts you in alert mode, finding a plastic bag feels good and discovering a moderately worn backpack can really make your day. The setting is built more on mystery than hordes of zombies, and that's nice too. What I didn't like is that you don't really grow in power and there is always the treat of a single enemy appearing close, hitting you once or twice and killing you on the spot before you really get a chance to react, even run. Most roguelikes I enjoyed with their permadeath allowed me to equip up, gain skills and health points and cling ever longer to dear life as I progressed. Here you can only find some unreliable equipment, so it's very easy to get killed even after hours of play to the same enemies that you encounter in the first minutes. Then it's back to square one. Nice as an excercise in "it will be really hard to survive in the post-apocalyptic world", but less entertaining in a game.

I really pains me to give this a one-star review, but when a game is this broken, what other choice do I have? To be fair, the game itself and what it has to offer is very nice. I really enjoy the atmosphere, scavenging for items, wondering if I'm going to be able to survive the next encounter with the equipment I've got and just the overall feel of everything. I actually really love this game. That said, it's got some bugs, and from what I've looked up, there's no sign of them being fixed at all. The disappearing items bug that happens sometimes when you try to move items into your campsite is just a little annoying, but it's not like the item itself just completely vanishes. Rather, the picture of the item is just not there. If you point the mouse over the space it's supposed to occupy, you'l see the item description pop-up and you can easily move it somewhere else where this problem won't happen. I imagine this bug would be more annoying the smaller the item is though. Tried looking up a way to fix it or see if it was being addressed, but it looked like the programmer couldn't figure out how to resolve the issue. The threads I found were fairly old, but I assume nothing changed in that time if I'm still coming across that bug after buying the game in late-September 2016. However, that's trivial compared to why I gave this one-star. My saves just randomly get corrupted. I can save and quit and it'll be fine most of the time, but then every so often I'll do that, go to load it later and it just hangs for eternity. That's broken beyond acceptable. I don't have a problem with the permadeath mechanic and constantly restarting when it's my own fault, and I even forgave the game for doing it the first time, but for it to happen again within the span of two weeks? I'm sorry, but that makes this thing unplayable for me, and if it's unplayable, I can't realistically see how this should be rated higher. Fix the bugs and you'll have a niche masterpiece.

Neo Scavenger starts strong and has a fun earlygame but once you actually reach the city the game is already halfway over. The game has a total of like 3 whole missions, one of which can be skipped entirely by passing a skillcheck. The game desperately needs some more stuff to do to make the price even remotely worthwhile. As it is it feels like an abandoned beta build that the developer just decided to give up on and sell. If it happens to be on sale then sure, go ahead and get it. You'll have fun for a good few hours or so. Just don't expect it to go anywhere.