You need to collect/produce resources to fix your engines. At first resources are near your base, but as you gather them your crew must walk longer.
Upgrading the weather station gives you some more reaction time to keep the crew inside if the temperatures drop to far.
Educating the crew is important, so a trip gives you the maximum amount of resources.
Sadly after the initial hump of who does what, there is no strategic element left. People gather parts, the ship breaks everyday a random part and artificially lengthens your stay.
Your crew sees illusions and spouts random nonsense. In the later half of the game some random red beams cover your screen from the AI that spouts random nonsense too - none of which seems to have an effect on the game play,
Like some browser game of the 2000: Good for half a day, but no replay value beyond that.
A survival management game which is far too challenging and has too little depth in its mechanics. Managing the few survivors and tasks is easy and you spend most of your time waiting for the progress bars to fill up. But with constant breakages and no way of recruiting more people, it’s easy to get into a fail state and the biggest choice is whether to keep drawing out your inevitable demise or start from the beginning and go through the exact same motions and plot beats again. The art style is good and the flickering images promise at something more in its plot, but it’s never realised. The plot and music is minimal and suits the overall aesthetic, but since the game play is also minimal, it ends up being too boring.
To preface, I got this free though a GOG sale. That said, I'm very glad I didn't actually spend any money on this game.
The gameplay itself is fairly straightforward, give a "peep" a job, they will repeat said job until given another or they complete stat regen/learning. Two stats, one (health) drains as long as the peep is cold and drains QUICKLY in a super cold environment. The other stat is hunger and it drains constantly, albeit slowly. Both stats are fairly easy to replenish, hover the mouse over the peep and select the "job" of replenishing the necessary stat. It takes a little time for replenish health, but you can always do so, and a supply of food to replenish hunger. When they are done replenishing, they automatically go back to work.
There are initially four jobs, chop lumber, grow food, gather materials, and learn how to do any of the three jobs better. Improve your work quality and you do the job better, carrying more resources per cycle, gathering resources slightly faster, etc. Later on a fifth job, work the power station, becomes available, but it REALLY isn't necessary for more than a few seconds. I charged the batteries in about 2 minutes, and never used more than a fifth of the charge. Lumber and materials MUST be gathered constantly, in order to survive. You need lumber to keep the base warm, and the materials fix things as they break, upgrade storage for resources, and are absolutely necessary to fixing your spaceship.
Good premise, something INTERESTING but never properly explained also is occurring though. Regularly you'll see "glitches" of bodies, gore, or just scenes of trees and pickup trucks. The frequency of these "glitches" seem to be based on peep health/hunger, but I cannot confirm that.
I beat the game on presumably "easy" in about 3 hours with one restart for a death on my first attempt. But the cool stuff is never explained, the game is highly repetitive, and the "survival" aspect isn't deep once you have basic stockpiles.
The game is very simple and on 'be brave' difficulty it is quite easy. What bothers me that there must be different endings but I can not find any concrete evidence on the internet! Very annoying. I finished the game 3x in a row and I am quite sure that being able to kill the crew members gives you the ability to trigger a different ending? Maybe I am tripping and there's nothing. Unfortunately I am not willing to spend more time to experience with different endings.
Short, but nice game. My first game, everyone died before I figured out how to do anything, but learning the interface and game mechanics is part of the fun. Nice atmoshpere.
