I get very influenced by the video output of the GB Team. I will completely forget how I might love to watch fighting games but rarely like playing them; only to see a clip of Jeff playing a Street Fighter game and I am re-installing every version I have, playing them for 10 minutes before promptly uninstalling them again. I love games, all sorts of games, but I am often made very aware there are game genres I should maybe reclassify as having respect for rather enjoying. But I still can’t help myself get drawn to them if I see other people having fun with them. Knowing myself this well has been a great help with curbing my terrible habit of impulse buying games, which I am thankful for given my current financial situation; but I still get the itch.
So, this year I’m going try to sate those itches with my unplayed back catalogue, which I think is stupidly big enough to be able to find a suitable replacement formost things, stopping my quick purchase of the next new and shiny game. My current itch is to play Valheim, watching the team’s recent Playdates have really made me want to give it a go but I know that my drop off rate with this sort of survival game is big. I tend to want to play solo, I’m never big on combat heavy survival and the dreaded corpse run so I am a little worried Valheim might not actually be the thing I’m looking for even though it’s the new shiny thing I want to try. Having a browse through my various backlogs I found some games I thought might be what I need to reduce the itch and found few to have a bash at. The first is Medieval Dynasty by Render Cube, the second is Ark: Survival Evolved by Studio Wildcard and Praey for the Gods by No Matter Studios, or as I like to call them, ‘Valheim with No Monsters’, ‘Valheim with Guns and Dinosaurs’ and ‘Valheim with Colossi’.
Medieval Dynasty is not Kingdom Come, which in my head it was, so when I stopped to actually read the blurb I realised this was actually more of a ‘Farming Simulator – Olden Times Edition’ than an RPG, which is why I’d passed over it so many times recently. It is still in early access, so I wasn’t expecting to get the longest of experiences with it but its promise of building a medieval settlement without hordes of beasts trying to stop your advancements, harsh biomes and bosses seemed to tick the right boxes for me. The opening hours of the game are unfortunately plagued with the early access, or perhaps lower budgeted, problems survival/simulation games can have. Poor tutorials, tools and their use not always being clear, very challenging to find resources, a bafflingly complex menu and the age-old favourite - doing many things okay rather than less things very well. But these barriers are mere trifles for someone as versed in half built and abandoned trash I got in a Steam sale because I didn’t read the reviews. And, after a quick restart once I worked out what it was I was actually supposed to be doing and where the resources were that I’d been blindly walking past, the game quickly put some hooks in me. The hooks of gathering sticks, chopping down trees and fetching all sorts of things for the local villagers was pleasant and the rough-around the edges but perfectly adequate countryside was a grand setting for it all. Speaking of the villagers, they are more like automatons in some knock-off WestWorld like setup than representations of actual people. Their speech is filled with knowing nods to other games and pop culture and I can’t work out if I like it or not. Their Fallout 3 level of movement and pathing is perhaps a bit more jarring than making a reference to a certain arrow in a certain knee.
The gated way simulation games tend to use to drive the player along does hamper the speed with which Medieval Dynasty progresses and while hampering the player can prevent them getting in too deep, too fast in other games in this one it feels too restraining. I think Medieval Dynasty would have been better having all the tech unlocked from the start, I mean the story basically says you already know how to do all the things you need to survive the world, so why hide it all behind a levelling and tech tree. I would have been happy to be on the route of, “if you can get the resources, knock yourself out.” For example, the player can only build one rabbit trap at a time early on. This is a low resource item, the avatar knows how to make it, why would they only be able to make one? Maddening. If I want to starve to death because I have spent all my time and resources on an overly ambitious house rather than gather food, I should be free to do so. All that said I ended up getting a slightly automated worker run farm going, was paying off my taxes without too much worry and was enjoying my time with it. Eventually the low budget/early access roughness was becoming less endearing and more frustrating, the busy work became more chore than trip into the woods or to the next village over, so I drew a curtain on my Medieval Dynasty.
I got a copy of Ark: Survival Evolved back in March 2016, which seems like a century away rather than 5 years ago, but I thought I’d wait for it to get a bit more spit and polish before getting into it. Only to find myself here in 2021 having never started it. As it’s on GamePass with a buttload of DLC I thought I’d fire it up from there – which is where the first hindrance to my enjoyment of the game started; with all the DLC the file size was over 200gb, which took me a bit of hard drive shuffling to free up and then took so very, very long to download. I was losing the will to actually play it at all with the extended time taking to just access it, this might be why I have favoured smaller (in size and scope) titles recently. I did eventually get to loading it up and after getting a solo campaign going and dying a few times very quickly into my adventure I decided I didn’t like Ark much. I’d never make much of a critic as I am perhaps a bit too positive about most games, but every now and then one comes along that even my ‘look on the bright side’ struggles to argue in support of, and Ark might be one of them. It’s a bit of a shame really as on paper this is the game 10-year-old me would have been dreaming of. The thumbnail has someone riding a T-Rex with some kind of space shotgun, it’s like they were looking through my childhood doodle pad. Ark has been around long enough for the major pros and cons to have been discussed at length but as my salve for the Valheim itch it just wasn’t doing it. While I don’t mind a challenge in the early stages of a survival game, I felt too punished by the opening of Ark. Two runs ended so shortly by a very large, very upset dinosaur right next to my spawn in and the other runs had me bow out by poor food management and not paying enough attention to my surroundings while I was looking for all the important things. Other games that have a tough start can make me feel like there is the need to approach something from a different angle, Ark just made me feel a bit like it didn’t want me to play it.
Ark is not a bad game and I can see for those more into the pressurised survival format this would be a great, entry but it was not for me. I also found its aesthetic not really doing it for me either, particularly the menus and UI, not sure what it is exactly but they just look off – like going back to early 360/PS3 era games and being reminded how much work there was still to do regarding UI design in complex modern open world games. It would be safe to say Ark did nothing to hold back the itch, if anything had I been in a situation where I could have scraped together the funds for it, I’d have gone and got Valhiem there and then.
Now, I had been confident that Ark was going to be the game that would have been the fist punch to the air moment of my new joyous survival experience, no Valheim needed! With it clearly not being that I dove back into my unplayed games and found Praey for the Gods – the Steam page checked the boxes of survival, Norse-adjacent mythos and crafting, all that and a file size and launcher that got it ready to play in minutes – big tick on the lack of waiting check-box. First, the rather terrible spelling of the prey/pray/praey is from an out of court settled name infringement so I shall resist throwing too much shade its way from that (and it was discussed on the UPF that Brad played this game on), but to help my gag reflex I might just go with PftG (which looks like an onomatopoeic vocalisation of what I think of the name anyway). PftG isn’t just filled with strange beasts, it is kind of is its own strange beast too. Reading the developer’s description on Steam, PftG sounds like the type of game that is maybe trying to fit a few too many elements into a limited space. The elevator pitch would probably sound something like ‘Shadow-of-the-Colossus-meets-Breath-of-the-Wild-meets-Tomb-Raider’ which, with the knowledge of the game’s very small development team, makes it very hard to not pre-label the game as a too much ambition project, or worse, a project that doesn’t deliver on any of anything.
I am very thankful to report, even in its early access state, PftG seems to have avoided both those tags so far. More than many games I have played in recent years it clearly wears its influences with pride and for the most part has done a good job of cherry picking the highlights from the games it is indebted to. The first giant is almost a carbon copy of the first or second colossi from SotC but it being there feels more like a knowing nod than a rip off and an excellent way to rapidly reduce the tutorialisation on the nature of the game for those in the know, and it’s a pretty spectacular opening for those that aren’t. And while closer inspection does make the game start to maybe show the grunts and groans of an ambitious team (the protagonist’s run is very reminiscent of PS1 Tomb Raider, which I both love the aesthetic of but also makes an otherwise very natural looking game take on a robotic aspect), it still runs and plays better than I think it has any right to. Which put me in the quandary a few hours in of whether or not to stop before I met the end of the early access and pick it back up when it more fully formed, but given how that went for Ark, maybe I should just enjoy it while I’m enjoying it. (Shortly after I wrote this the team announced it was very near to a 1.0 release so I have put myself on pause until that comes out)
To the matter in hand, did PftG make me forget the pull of Valheim? Not really, but it did alleviate the need to do one of my semi regular events of digging out the PS2 to play Shadow of the Colossus for a while. The lack of proper base building mechanic was the biggest missing part in its Valheim comparison but of the three games I tried this gave me the most pure enjoyment which I would have missed out on had I not been spurred on to jump on a zeitgeist.
As a thought experiment I came to the conclusion that if I had been able to afford Valheim, I am confident that I would have thought it fun, totally seen what the fuss was about and then dropped off it as soon as the level of dedication and teamwork the game looks like its asks of the player for the later stages got too much for me – the boos fights look a bit like a slog the more I see of them. It might have taken around 40 years, but I think I might have finally dropped the mental desire to grab a game when the cool people are playing it and instead enjoy something that maybe gives a tangential good feeling.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, the right answer for me personally feeling a part of the Valheim zeitgeist? Turns out it was Minecraft with some Norse skins and mods. Minecraft, so often the answer to every need.
How about yourselves? Any good suggestion for the filling the Valheim hole in your life?
Log in to comment