Bugs of the Dead
If you're a child of the eighties and early nineties, the concept of Organ Trail is probably going to sound delightful. Redesigning Oregon Trail with zombies and Romero-esque touches seems like it should be the recipe for a hilariously good time. But a great concept doesn't make up for terrible aiming controls, poor hitboxes, and a handful of irritating, game-breaking bugs.
Let's get the good out of the way - this game emulates its inspirations with gleeful abandon. It steals the classic Oregon Trail gameplay, throws out the deer and bears for zombies, and sets you loose on a grim, darkly funny path across the American wasteland. There's a brief introductory segment that familiarizes you with the game's basic concepts, but if you played any amount of Oregon Trail in school as a kid, you'll know immediately what you're looking at.
And as for its zombie roots, Organ Trail keeps it pretty much to the classics. Some of the music seems directly inspired by songs from 28 Days Later and Night of the Living Dead, while the 8-bit graphics do a pretty neat interpretation of several film classics. The various locations you travel to are also obvious rips from movies, such as The Mall. All of this is fine and good, except that it's hiding some terrible flaws underneath its grin-inducing exterior.
The game's biggest flaw is in its aiming controls. My God, do they suck on the PC. In theory, you basically click and drag in the inverse of the direction you want to shoot. A line on-screen shows you where you're aiming. It's simple enough in theory. But all too often, I found myself swinging my mouse wildly, swearing profusely at the game for not reading the movements of the mouse. The aiming reticle will pull slightly towards the direction you want to aim, and from there, it's a crap-shoot if you'll actually be able to line up shots or not. The reticle disappears from sight sometimes too if you move the mouse cursor far enough away while aiming. Considering that a lot of the game's sequences require you to have pinpoint accuracy, it's extremely frustrating. According to Steam's forums, the creator has little intention of fixing the combat, stating that it's a task that scares him, since it would require extensive redesigns of early coding. I certainly hope he changes his mind, because this is easily the worst part of the game and drags the whole experience down.
Those combat problems extend to hitboxes, too. Instead of needing to reach your character to injure you, zombies instead need to touch a large-ish square around your character, leading to a lot of frustration while scavenging and escaping the grasp of the zombies. What's worse is that the hitboxes for the zombies appear A-OK, leading to more problems with the necessary precision of aiming.
While the game may be mostly functional, a series of frustrating bugs capped off my hours of gameplay. While the game isn't necessarily difficult if you can manage to stay healthy and avoid lots of combat, a late game bug meant that instead of ending the game at the Safe Haven, I wound up overshooting it in my car, leading to an endlessly cycling waiting animation in the bottom right hand corner while nothing else happened. There are numerous other small bugs as well, mostly related to Steam achievements.
It's a frustrating mess of a game right now, but there's such a great heart behind the game that it's hard to hate. It's super cheap, too. But is it worth it? Well, that depends on how nostalgic you feel for Oregon Trail as opposed to how much you're willing to suffer through some glaring problems. This might be one of those games you only play for all of half an hour, but that doesn't mean it's not necessarily worth a look. Just be warned - it's not as great as it should be.