Overland

I purchased Overland on sale, and spent about 13 hours playing it on Normal, with a couple complete restarts and a lot of restarted levels to finish it, ultimately without anyone dying and without losing a vehicle. It was definitely worth playing through once, but I'm not sure I would play through it again.

I've only put a few hours into it so far, but so far I find the game really interesting Conceptually it feels like a crossover between FTL, Into the Breach, and This War of Mine, where you have to continually scavenge for fuel to keep a vehicle going, but each scenario is like a short tactical RPG scenario, where you have some objective, like finding fuel, interacting with other survivors, trading, or moving barricades that stop your car from moving, all the while being hunted by these strange alien creatures. What reminds me of Into the Breach and This War of Mine in particular is that it is not at all combat focused. You can fight the monsters, but it's dangerous, your characters are super squishy, taking 2 hits to leave them in a downed/critical state, and even 1 hit severely impairing the amount of actions they can take, so it's best to avoid combat if possible and focus on the task at hand, and getting out of the scenario ASAP. This makes going over each action incredibly meaningful and making sure you are efficient with your actions is vital to surviving each encounter It's not perfect, theres definitely some jank here and there, perhaps places where the game doesn't clearly communicate well enough what is happening. For example, during the first barricade scenario, it was unclear how to actually interact with the barricades in question and I ended up blowing up my car thinking I was destroying the barricade, and had to figure out how to push and pull and destroy the blocks and hoof it to find a new car. There was also a scenario at a pharmacy where it was unclear that you can't just walk in the front door or climb in a window, and had to find the meds inside a dumpster outside, which is a strange interaction I'm looking forward to continuing the game. And might give it a better rating once I find the dog from the trailer....

I was having fun for a few hours. Then I acquired a second vehicle. I had two drivers available, so I fueled up both cars and had each driver start up their vehicle. However, when I selected "escape" it left one vehicle and its occupants behind, resigning me to a quick short solitary death a few miles down the road. The game should have a very explicit warning that you're leaving without people as well as making it more clear you can't have more than one vehicle.

I'm not the sort to bash games just because I enjoy complaining. And this really isn't a "bash," so to speak; for what it is, the game is a quality piece of playable art. But if you're looking for anything other than that (like fun, for example), I'd recommend steering away from this one. The art direction is its core strength. With its minimalistc visuals and soundtrack, the game really nails the quiet, eerie, depressing atmosphere it's going for. The experience left me feeling more emotionally hollow than many of the over-the-top apocalypse settings of some AA and AAA titles. Whether or not you will enjoy this hollowed-out feeling will depend on your taste, of course, but for my part, it served as a pretty good deterent against starting another campaign. And that's saying something. After your first playthrough, the game unlocks an "all dogs" mode where you can play, ostensibly, as an entire troup of fluffy shiba inus. As great as that sounds, the game just really couldn't pull me in enough to want to play it again, no matter how many shiba inus it promised to let me shove into a minivan. See, there are games that are addictive because they are simple, and there are games that are fun because they are difficult. This game is both exceedingly simple and brutally difficult (on any setting beyond the default). But the way it combines these two things just feels... empty. Repetitive. Joyless. I love tactical turn-based strat games, so it's not the mechanical genre that I dislike. There's just something I can't quite put my finger on that makes this experience feel excessively flat. Each playthrough will take you less than five hours, which is a really disappointing length of time for a $20 game. Endgame consists of dry "play it again but with even MORE difficulty" challenges that try to stretch out that time but fail to motivate you to actually play more. It's a quality indie title, so I wish I could speak higher praise. But the fact is that it's just "meh."

Pretty basic clunky game play with seemingly arbitrary difficulty. Boring and repetitive. Graphics feel amateurish rather than stylistically minimal. I didn't really enjoy it.