A nice exploration & survival game. You start out on a tropical island where you have to search for food and building materials. In the beginning it may be hard to stay alive and I recommend saving each time before going to sleep, as spiders may poison you during sleep. Drinking water from a pond also has a random chance of poisoning you. Later on you can get around this or create potions that will heal you. But in the very beginning you have to carefully decide what to build next and when. The crafting and building system feels similar to that of Medieval Dynasty and similar games. You can build a wooden hut and later on you get more options for building stone buildings or even more modern ones. It's odd however, that the modern buildings still make use of the same wooden roof as the wooden hut. A modern roof later on might have been a better option.
Compared to many other games, Retreat to Enen is different when it comes to quests. Many games offer you a lot of quests and side-quests. Retreat to Enen takes a much simpler approach, visit 3 islands and on each of them the quest is the same: visit 3 ruins and a cave to get access to the next island. I liked this simple approach as it gives you much freedom.
The interface looks nice but controls could have been better. For movement the wasd keys are used and a few others like q, e and x for interaction. Many times I had the feeling: why not use the left mouse button for the e-key instead? And the right mouse button for the x-key for example.
The game has many beautiful places that you might want to take a picture of. But unfortunately, no screenshot feature is included. Also, there's no way to hide the interface completely, as that would have worked too.
On some of the GOG screenshots I could see a compass. However, it seems to have been removed as it was not present in the latest version. A pity, as the map is a very rough sketch of the island with very few details. The player position and the marker-flags are not indicated on this map for example. The map only gives you a rough idea where the ruins are.
The landscape looks realistic but you can easily get lost. Even though you're the only person on the islands, the islands feel very lively with birds in the air and animals walking about. The ambient sound only reinforces that.
After you have visited all 3 islands, you can go your own way and build a larger house anywhere on the 3 islands. The game felt a little bit short on one hand, but gives you a lot of freedom on the other hand. I would love to see more from this developer, as suggested by the ending scene.
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