The Oregon Trail Review

The Oregon Trail
Developer: Gameloft
Publisher: Gameloft
Platforms: PC, Switch, IOS
Release Date: November 14, 2022
MSRP: 29.99

It can be hard to talk about The Oregon Trail

The little franchise that could from the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium began in 1971 as little more than text, before being rereleased for the Apple II with an updated graphical interface, becoming a fond and memorable (if frustrating) experience for grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers alike. Discussing the modern update of The Oregon Trail means engaging with that legacy, which is both inevitable and kind of unfair. Gameloft’s 2021 update of The Oregon Trail, ported here to PC from its mobile incarnation on Apple Arcade, is decidedly not the Oregon Trail we know and love. It’s different. But as much as it should be evaluated on its own merits and discussed as its own thing, it’s still difficult to completely separate. Which is a shame, because despite some wrinkles, the new and updated Oregon Trail is a really solid game that improves upon some weaknesses of the series.

There are some who might be unfamiliar with The Oregon Trail, so here goes: You are a settler on a cross-country journey from Independence, Missouri to the promised land of Oregon with a wagon train. You choose your traveling companions, wagon type, any provisions, and then set off across the vast countryside on a mission to reach the Pacific Northwest or die trying. Along the way, you encounter a staggering array of hazards, everything from wagon breakdowns to getting shot because you try to take bullets through the high desert. But with enough luck, skill, and careful planning, you can brave the trip across America and find your place in a new land.

The Oregon Trail is fairly basic gameplay-wise. You choose things from a variety of menus, set your pace and ration consumption, and hit the “travel” button. Along the way, you choose which direction to take from a node map similar to FTL and games of that stripe, leading to a number of encounters on your way between destinations. This also adds a layer of strategy to the game— do you go for the sidequest and possible rewards down the line, or do you make sure your settlers have the bath they sorely need at the campsite and miss out on further encounters? It adds a layer of strategy missing from the basic gameplay of “travel, hunt, rest, random event,” and does actually pull the game into a little more of a narrative than “this guy I named after my friend died of cholera because I didn’t rest long enough.” It improves the gameplay just enough while keeping the classic feel, adding narrative to a game that always had the bones for emergent narrative but perhaps a little less story. Thankfully, that story has been vastly expanded.

That expansion comes in the form of multiple side-stories, each with their own unlocks for the main game. There are boasts between hunters around the campfire, a trilogy of stories about a family reuniting over the course of the trail, a group of gold rushers heading to California, and in one of the nastiest stories ever put in a comparatively lighthearted adventure game, the journey of a group of arms merchants to a fort over an inhospitable desert. Each one has its own set of mechanics, narrative, and characters, using the general framework of The Oregon Trail to tell a wide variety of stories within its compact confines. Sidestepping some of the previous iterations’ more culturally insensitive moments, it also portrays indigenous Americans as fully realized characters in their own right, their stories standing out every bit as much as their counterparts. It’s a way to introduce variety into what’s a very straightforward game, and one that, while not really needing the expansion of its story, benefits from it.

The graphics overhaul also adds something to the game, nicely balancing the retro feel with the overworld map, pixelated art style, and travel nodes, but making the most of PC graphical displays with its expansive vistas and long treks— there are beautiful sunsets, wide open skies, roaring rivers, and some beautiful forests to explore on your trek northwest. It’s a gorgeous game, with characters trudging across the screen as a variety of pixelated wildlife flies to and fro across your field of view, day and night cycling as you stop. The music also adds to this, while there are few tracks, it creates a sense of forward momentum, always ambling towards the next destination, enjoying the scenery on the way. There’s even a wildlife and sightseeing mode for those who’d rather just sit and enjoy things for a while. It’s an excellent use of modern resources to update something older, and it makes the whole work feel of a piece.

But while the updates and expansions to The Oregon Trail are welcome, Gameloft’s update is unable to escape some of the game’s flaws. Once you’ve played the stories to completion, you’re basically done with them. When you play the main game there are a few side quests and random events, but you’ll quickly see them all within your first two plays of the main game mode. It makes things feel wide, but ultimately shallow, like a huge puddle. Once you take enough journeys along the Trail, there’s just not much there to explore, and all the gorgeous scenery along the way can’t hide that. Even the side stories get a little repetitive on repeat plays. The game is wonderful that first or second time through— I personally lost hours to it when I started it up— but the lack of longevity made me wonder if I should keep playing or set it aside after I managed to beat it.

Compounding this, the random events have somehow gotten more random. It made sense that you could get things like cholera and dysentery along the trail. They seemed like sicknesses and ailments that would genuinely happen, along with things like wagon breakdowns, injuries, drowning, and attacks by bandits and wild animals. But explain to me how someone can go from perfectly fine and in full health to suddenly dying because she broke her arm when the wagon rolled over her, followed by dying seconds later from a broken arm I had no chance to treat? I understand bringing ammo into the high desert resulted in one of my settlers being shot, but the randomness of it, the sudden lethality, and the necessity of the ammo (hunting and fishing are the only ways to get a decent amount of food between settlements and without trading) with no way to mitigate things made it seem needlessly cruel. There were times when I’d have a 95% chance of crossing a river, and then lose my entire expedition while the game chided me for not caulking my wagon, a thing I’d actually successfully done. There were other times where suddenly my wagon would just decide to fall apart. It elevated the normal brutality to a vicious streak of nihilistic fatalism, and one that made it difficult to want to continue playing the game.

So in the end, what’s left is…complicated. A marked improvement over past Oregon Trail games? Certainly. It’s gorgeous, addictive to play, has a ton of content (and more on the way) and it’s worth it for those initial vibrant bursts. But once those bursts wear off and the honeymoon period is over, you’re left with a game that while interesting, fun, addictive, and great to look at, is also shallow and needlessly cruel. It’s a game that matches its legacy— fond memories of the good times you have while playing it, but a hesitation to start things up again once you finally make it down the Trail.

The Good:
- Gorgeous graphics and music
- Addictive core gameplay loop
- Interesting and fleshed-out characters
- Unlock system that rewards playing through the different modes and side stories

The Bad:
- Replay value wanes quickly
- Needlessly cruel RNG

Final Score:

A lovely update that unfortunately can’t completely escape the original

Sweet Transit - An Early Access Review

Platform: PC
Developer: Ernestas Norvaišas
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: Early Access as of July 28, 2022

Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game.

From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game. There’s a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and the idea of building trains to connect cities and unlock further buildings and advancements is kind of a cool one. You’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and from there, to slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains.

It’s at the point somewhere around building your first train that you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python. Sweet Transit is, you see, a systems-based game, in the sense that you have to work out logistics, gates, and kind of puzzle out where the bugs are in your transit system. Some of this is covered by the tutorials. Some of it remains obtuse, always just tantalizingly out of reach. It’s a game with a rather steep learning curve, and one that remains sweetly deceptive even as you bash your head against yet another logistics problem for the fourth time. It’s satisfying, brain-melting, and somehow intriguing in one bizarre package.

Sweet Transit begins with you procedurally generating a map. From there, you place your first warehouse, first village center, and your first industries before finally connecting it all up with railways. As you fulfill more objectives, you slowly open up more options— successfully building a coal plant means you get access to your first train, because you now have a source of fuel, bringing enough people to your village means you open up a market— and connecting the world through a network of rails and signal gates. As nothing moves without a rail network, it places the emphasis on building trains, routes, learning how to set up if/then statements to get your trains to move along those routes, and building signals to control the flow of rail traffic.

So right off the bat, the game is gorgeous. The areas are lush, the colors are vibrant, and even the deserts look like they’re alive. The trains are usually brightly colored in a way that makes the player feel nostalgic for old-style locomotive engines. Between the graphical style and instrumentals, it evokes feelings of the older Sid Meier series Railroad Tycoon, which ran on a similar premise of connecting supply centers with trains in a huge logistical network. With the bluesy Americana of the soundtrack, it makes everything feel of a piece. It’s an excellent presentation.

It’s also satisfying to watch things work, to slowly build up your villages and watch them bustle around as you slowly build the town, then the first industry (usually a fishing dock) and then move on to mines and your first train line. Buildings are grouped by use, you can simply click on any part of the environment, and it’ll bring up a menu about the thing you clicked, with the list of building options and extensions right there. It’s very easy in those first few moments to get a jump-start on building. Then you fall off the difficulty cliff, and the game decides to show you what it’s really like.

Building railroads is…complex. It’s also very easy to get stuck with something that doesn’t work, requiring you to plot things out in advance. While the game does come with an extensive tutorial that shows you how to build and chain together signal blocks, set up the basic if/then statements for your train routes, and connect your first villages, it is also very obtuse. This is not a game for those who are just getting into strategy of this type, it’s essentially a ‘90s sim builder game given modern graphics and a mildly easier to understand interface. Even with the tutorials, it’s got a steeper learning curve, requiring you to really know what you’re doing before you lay those first tracks. But the good news is, after the first few tries, suddenly it starts to hum along, and you’re juggling routes, finding more efficient ways to lay rail, and it all starts to come together.

But to get to that point, there’s a lot of trial and error. While the tutorials do give some guidance, and there are help messages, they seem a little obtuse at times. It took me three tries to get my first functioning railroad, with at least one complete restart. When I finally did get things running, it took me a while to experiment with signals until the trains I had would actually move on the tracks, and in one case, a train I sent to load up supplies would just…pass the station completely rather than loading, for reasons still unclear even with the (somewhat overzealous) message system pointing out any errors in logistics. This is after going through the tutorials. Similarly, a bug in the logistics can stall everything, frustrating the player and requiring them to check exactly what happened.

Furthermore, if you botch a building placement, there’s no real way to move it or correct that mistake once it’s down without deleting everything attached to it and moving it to the correct place. This can get annoying, especially with train routes, since then the trains now have specific instructions they cannot carry out and things will have to be re-added to the route. Further frustrating the placement issues are some bizarre pathing errors when laying train tracks, where trying to construct a simple curve will result in esoteric, looping patterns unless you use the “precise movement” option to build tracks incrementally. It’s kind of an unforgiving system, even as it does so many things right.

All of this could actually be fixed with a more integrated tutorial. The tutorial section is very well done and informative, though as it’s not actually connected to starting up a game, it becomes an exercise where one can get very good at learning the tutorials, but a little fuzzier on applying that knowledge. If there was some way to take you through the early steps of the game, it would do a lot for newer players, allowing them to get a grip on systems in a more practical and applied way. It’s a game with some great ideas and some interesting systems that actually has a kind of coding aspect to it, setting up if/then statements and building with more complexity from there.

But for right now, if you’re a hardcore simulation fan, then this will be a definite delight, a pleasing and cozy-looking game with a lot of interlocking systems that require prior planning and full knowledge of how things work to get everything moving just right. It’s the perfect game for those who know what they’re doing.

It could, however, use a little more polish if you’re still new to the genre.

The Good:
- Easy and intuitive interface
- Lush, pleasant visual style
- Deep and complex logistical mechanics
- Excellent map variety
- A relaxing game with just enough challenge for hardcore building sim fans

The Bad:
- Huge difficulty curve for newcomers
- Frustrating pathing for a game entirely about building transit paths
- Making a wrong move can sometimes erase tons of work.
- Tutorials separate from the main game cause difficulty applying the knowledge to in-game scenarios

In its current early access state, it’s a delight for hardcore sim fans and a nightmare to those just getting into things.

Thy Creature Review

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Platform: PC
Developer: MazM
Publisher: Growing Seeds Corporation
Release Date: Early Access as of February 19, 2022

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I want to talk about the difference between “obtuse” and “cryptic.”

It’s a difference few people consider in their storytelling. Most people think one is basically the pretentious version of the other, but that’s where they’re wrong, and not just because “pretentious” is the silliest possible insult for someone attempting something ambitious. No, “cryptic” is a mystery that definitely has something to it. Questions get answered, things are weird, but you know where you stand, more or less. It can be frustrating, but it can also be thrilling and odd and compelling. Carnivale is cryptic. Dark Souls is cryptic. Hell, Myst is cryptic. Every puzzle has a solution, questions have answers, and you only learn enough for a sense of accomplishment and to drive you forward into further knowledge. Cryptic is interesting. Cryptic goes somewhere.

Thy Creature is obtuse.

Obtuse can be a good thing sometimes, when you want to invoke the surreal or have things be weird or add difficulty. Sometimes “opaque” can be even better, just look at most adventure games from the 1990s— a dreamlike feeling, you have no idea what’s going on, but clearly you’re along for the ride. But other times, obtuse is just exhausting, like with Thy Creature. Questions are answered, but it never feels like those answers are satisfying. Progress is made, but it still feels like you’re standing still. It’s clear the game wants you to think something is going on, but it never feels like you make any progression in figuring out what that is. Which is a shame, because there’s the potential to be a really good adventure game here, if it didn’t fall into all the worst pitfalls.

Thy Creature stars The Creature, a patchwork abomination of body parts who is run out of a village and severely wounded by humans. The creature takes refuge in an unusual and ancient tower, one that haunts his memories. Once inside, he finds himself attacked by monsters and accosted by the tower’s trapped inhabitants, who have their own difficulties with memories, all of them looking for the tower’s owner, Victor Frankenstein. To climb the tower and unlock his own memories and experiences, the Creature will have to fight the mysterious monsters known as Nepes, rescue the memories of the tower’s other inhabitants, and eventually reach the top, all while confronting a variety of mysteries and puzzles along his path.

From the start, Thy Creature has a lot going for it. A gothic atmosphere, lovely music, a plot full of mysteries, and a rather unique art style and control scheme. It feels like a scaled-up RPG Maker game, one of those ones with a lot of places to explore, people to meet, and a story to gradually uncover as you do. The journal promises secrets to uncover about your new friends in the tower and a variety of interesting collectibles to track down, and it has all the makings of an interesting game with a lot of heart behind it.

The game even starts incredibly well, with a fully animated music video welcoming you to the world and showing the Creature’s journey to the mysterious tower, having burned his former home and trudged across the desolate landscape until he finally reaches his destination, the song full of emotion, the strings lush. The tower’s music is creepily atmospheric, and the opening hallways full of defaced and demonic paintings leading into “the fiesta,” a creepy birthday party with a noticeable shift in color scheme, is really effective. Noah’s suitably mysterious, and his guarded behavior combined with you finding his memories makes for an awesome introduction to what should be a compelling mystery adventure game.

Which it would be, if it weren’t so frustrating. Quickly, the core gameplay loop is established: Get insulted by Noah, seemingly your only companion in the place, do some switch puzzles to open up some areas, fight some monsters, grab more memories, then open the exit to the sub-area at which point you get insulted by Noah again, he tells you how to get to the next sub-area, rinse, repeat. This wouldn’t be so bad— each area has its own unique form of “nepe,” the monsters that siphon and hoard memories, putting them in little crystals— but when you realize that for the third time you’ll have to backtrack in and out of rooms, only for your reward to be minimal progress, it gets exhausting.

It also doesn’t help that while each area has its own unique look, the rooms within that area tend to get repetitive and patience with the puzzles tends to run a little thin. Especially when the puzzles get more complicated, meaning you have to move backwards and forwards, opening up pathways, grumbling as I have to essentially perform the same task over and over again, but more difficult this time. It feels padded, like they needed to make up the length of the game by artificially extending things, putting more obstacles and barriers between you and the story.

Which brings us to the battles. Battles in Thy Creature take the form of bullet hell maze sequences. You run around the maze path, dodging bullet patterns until a group of dark crystals appears, then pick up the crystals to damage the creatures. It’s novel, and there’s a sense of urgency at times, with bullets flying from every direction but limited movement keeping things tense. Combined with some interesting creature designs, this makes a lot of the earlier battles in a chapter seem really interesting.

But this, too, falls short. Bullet hell derives its name from the way it fills the screen with projectiles, forcing players to find their way through a seemingly impenetrable wall of light and color. It lives and dies on figuring out how to thread the needle with your hitboxes, to move through the onslaught and come out the other side. Thy Creature by comparison has an awkward hitbox, the limited movement also means you can get easily boxed in and slammed by that awkward hitbox placement, and while there’s some clever darting from cover to cover represented by environmental puzzles in the later battles, it gets frustrating when something representing a stuffed doll but evil shrieks and charges you at warp speed, rapid-firing clusters of bullets over and over again. The repetitive enemy design also doesn’t help, with there being maybe one enemy type for a whole area until the boss.

What’s most frustrating, though, is that it doesn’t always do this. When the boss battles come out, when the story actually progresses, when characters have tender moments together or the Creature tries to learn more about being human— when it’s the parts of the game you can tell the developers worked really hard on, it shines. The clouds part and suddenly you’re playing a game you’re invested in again. There’s a really cool boss battle against a monstrous mutated stuffed bunny that feels tense and epic, but then you remember it’s in Thy Creature or get hit weird because you forgot which switch dissolved which piece of cover, or because your hitbox didn’t cover things this time, and suddenly you’re brought shrieking down to Earth.

The game is still in Early Access, so it’s entirely possible that it’s just lacking in a little polish. Maybe if the pacing were a little faster, if the hitboxes on The Creature were a little clearer, if the regular enemy music wasn’t the same grinding drone, if there wasn’t as much wandering around trying to figure out the solution to a switch puzzle, this could be a stone cold classic. It’s frustrating, because I can see the game they wanted to make. I want to play that game. Hell, I still want to figure out more of what’s going on in this game and see if the story takes a turn. It felt like it was going to.

But it’s not cryptic. it’s not intriguing. It’s a game with a ton of frustratingly good elements that then repeats them over and over until you get tired of them.

And that’s just exhausting

The good:
- Interesting atmosphere
- Unique art style blending anime-esque visuals with gothic horror
- Unusual plot centered around unlocking memories and secrets in a mansion
- Gorgeous soundtrack
- Some interesting depth in discovering journal entries, collectibles, and memories

The bad:
- Frustrating, repetitive puzzles and combat
- Depth gives way to shallowness as the game moves along
- Glacial pacing makes all the rough patches that more obvious

Gamedec Review

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Publisher: Anshar Publishing
Developer: Anshar Studios
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Sept. 16, 2021
Price: $29.99 USD

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Gamedec is frustrating. It’s always difficult to write a review like this, a game I clearly had some fun with, a game I really want to like, but that I also have to criticize. It’s a cyberpunk noir RPG-adventure game with actual investigation and deduction mechanics. The world is so deep you could spend hours lost in the various codexes and character bios alone. The graphics are a little basic in places, but the world has a genuine aesthetic that it’s a lot of fun to look at and wander through. But every time I find myself charmed by its world, I get stuck in the level and forced to load a save. A decision tree might say one thing but possibly mean another.

In short? This could be a really good game, a solid entry in the genre pioneered by Disco Elysium that’s just starting to take off (see also Murder Mystery Machine and to a more failed extent, The Sunken City) but dear God is it in a rough state.

Sometimes, a car is an effective solution

Gamedec drops you into the trenchcoat of the titular gamedec, a kind of private investigator who handles cases in virtual reality MMOs. As you hunt down cheaters, scammers, cultists, and the odd child labor ring, you make enough to get by and hopefully try to make a little light in the dark world of futuristic Warsaw. But as you investigate, slowly another, more sinister thread emerges— one involving a mysterious tree, twin cultists, and possibly even your own memories and thoughts themselves. It will take all your cunning and instinct to get out of this one, especially in a world where everyone’s wearing a false identity.

So first, the good. Gamedec’s investigation system is unrivaled and I wish more games would do something like it. As you solve sidequests and gather clues, you slowly fill up a group of deductions. At any time, you can use the clues you have to make a conclusion and move on to the next phase of the case, as long as you’ve collected enough evidence for it. This can be a godsend if you’ve gotten tired of a certain scene or movement in the game. It also allows something most games don’t, which is the ability to draw the wrong conclusion and possibly send the case in a different direction.

This ties directly into the branching narrative. Choices you make don’t just last within your current investigation, but can have far-reaching consequences down the line, depending on how you interact with others and what clues you can figure out. Each case has a variety of outcomes, and depending on your skills, background, approach to each situation, and how you interpret the clues, you can get a wildly branching story with a number of start and endpoints based on that. In theory, it’s liberating— a huge (if linear) world where all your choices matter and each playthrough can be completely different based on how you work the case.

Aiding in this, there are a number of “professions” related to skills you can pick up, everything from electronic intrusion to programming to even cheating in games. Each one’s related to different methods of responding, so you can level up your skills based on how you play, as you’ll be earning points from that. It’s incredibly adaptive, and while the skill tree might not be as vast as some adventure/RPGs, it’s a lot more expressive in places, with clear, concise descriptions telling you what everything is supposed to do.

The most essential starting skill. Never leave home without it

But here would be where things start to fall apart a little. While it’s clear how things might help, the actual in-game benefits range from “marginally useful” to “can solve entire stages of the case in one section and then do very little the rest of the game.” It’s not clear how helpful a profession can be until you use it, at which point you might be rather deep into a case. Similarly, while the skill points you earn are based on the personality of your gamedec, apart from a few adjectives and a group of bars on the side, it’s unclear exactly how the points you need to earn relate to each approach. Overall, this just makes it feel obtuse and confusing more than anything.

Adding to that obtuse feeling, sometimes puzzling through the plot feels like stumbling blindly. While it’s to be expected that you won’t see or do everything during one playthrough (and Gamedec makes this very clear as you play), the lack of direction, existence of wrong choices, and the idea that some things can be permanently locked off just make it feel obstructive rather than open-ended. Sure, it’s refreshing to have a game that allows you to miss content and doesn’t hand-hold at all, but Gamedec’s lack of signposting feels downright malicious at times. Especially when compared to the game’s own demo, which walked you through an early case without completely solving everything for you. It’s especially annoying when combined with the difficulty, where sometimes making the wrong deduction and getting the wrong people angry with you can feel like the game hits a dead end.

Gamedec could also benefit from a better quest log. While I understand the need for the player to puzzle through everything on their own, the lack of a detailed log apart from the information on the right-hand side of the screen makes it difficult to know what direction you need to travel in at all. Even the slightest bit of info could help, as it’s difficult to tell what “investigate the anomaly” means apart from wandering around and looking at the street, hoping the right hotspot suddenly reveals itself.

Getting stuck in VR Farmville is a special kind of Hell

Which brings us to the bugs. Even with the fixes and patching done to the initial prerelease build, the game’s in rough shape. While I can’t speak to every player’s experience, I personally ended up getting stuck in place in some areas, clicking frantically in an effort to move around the screen. There were also moments where NPCs reacted to dialogue from later in the scene, or simply closed conversations quickly using dialogue from earlier parts. One scene stopped completely dead, making it impossible to continue. In a rather odd gesture, controller support is automatically enabled when the game detects a controller, and no option in the menu exists to turn it off. It’s upsetting that a game with this much promise is this rough, but it’s also a sad reality that sometimes ambitious projects just need a little more love

So should you play Gamedec? Unequivocally, yes. But not right now. Wait a little longer, let the game get a little more polish, and you’ll be rewarded with an unusual and fun adventure/RPG with a wide degree of replayability. But until it sheds that layer of frustration and smooths out some of the rough edges, you’re going to want to be a little more patient.

The Good
- Deep, branching mystery with unusual characters and a twisting plot
- Excellent character interactions and some truly messed-up noir scenes
- Intriguing mechanics for both character creation and investigation
- Deduction mechanic rewards players for finding evidence and replaying scenes
- Immersive cyberpunk world

The Bad
- Obtuse narrative design means it’s difficult to find out where to go next
- Loads of bugs can make getting through the game painful
- Large range of deductions can make getting the essence of the story a little difficult

Final Score:

Final note: This game was procured as a review code in exchange for an honest review. The review is based on a release build as of 9/11/2021. It may not reflect the final build of the game