Neo Scavenger Review It's pretty good but has some problems

Let's begin with the positive news about NEO Scavenger. Despite my skepticism about the UI, it's really not bad. You may experience some awkwardness in the beginning, but soon everything seems natural as you begin to get used to the idea that every aspect of the game is an inventory.

The crafting system in NEO Scavenger is also great in my opinion, and it's a significant feature of the game. One of your beginning qualities will affect your ability to purchase positive traits.

The creators made your character qualities feel substantial, and I think they did a good job. Botanists can enjoy berries and other fruits without any fear of hunger or thirst, but trappers can easily build a fire with the help of matches or a lighter, which may become necessary when you begin to freeze. In the early game, having the ability to survive in melee combat is quite important, but being strong at ranged play in the late game is even better.

It's also great because there's no XP system to reward excessively violent behavior. You do not want to get involved in battles, since they drain resources, are likely to cause injury, and because of the game's permadeath mechanism, any major blunders will lead to your demise. I'm all about these methods for inspiring people to care about their decisions.

But why am I not in favor of it?

NEO Scavenger is full of dead ends, and as a result, I cannot suggest it. As with NPI's criticism of early D&D modules where a character had no choice but to die when moving left instead of right, there were more than a few situations where a hero's or coward's choice only resulted in instant death. The only way to succeed was to repeat it over and over until I found the perfect path. In most games, this is less of a problem, but when there's permadeath like in NEO Scavenger, it's more outrageous.

You'll be able to avoid permanent death by just choosing one road over the other, which will still have its own end. In other cases, it feels like a missed opportunity, especially when there is no load screen for misclicks or misreads.

Although I will admit that some people do enjoy that sort of experience, and if you're the kind of person who enjoys running at a wall repeatedly in order to find "the one true path," then I think Neo Scavengers does a passable job of constructing narrative beats that compel you to discover the right thing to do.

Furthermore, I think the writing is uneven and at times terrible. The speech with significant NPC's appears poorly scripted in places (such as when first meeting the ATN enclave). I must add a startling action: "Pretend to be mentally challenged" (when you get to the DMC bank). It's disconcerting since the game definitely could have conveyed the same story element in a different way.

There are a few bits of conversation that don't sound quite right when you notice them, but I've found most of the language for major NPC's to be good.

I appreciate they are trying hard to be a simulation in NEO Scavenger, vyt it is extremely difficult to play correctly if you make the wrong choice. You'll have no one to blame but yourself if you drink untreated water, leave your flashlight on, or forget to collect your cart before leaving camp. But a few of these issues just seem trivial, don't they?

Due to the restricted area, NEO Scavenger depends on carts in order to store items. And the truth is, you might just forget to re-equip it after a fight, or you could've emptied out a box and now the vital item you need is back there someplace, miles behind you, and there's no time to go back and retrieve it. If you have been wandering away from your supplies for a few turns, this might be a nuisance, but it can be very devastating if this means having to wipe and restart.

You're required to do a lot of mental labor during the game, as you're compelled to play by other people's rules. Have you scanned your things to verify their durability, thereby ensuring that your backpack won't unexpectedly open up and dump everything on the ground while you're out in the middle of nowhere? When you were searching for your pistol and you turned over the boxes in your room, did you double-check that you hadn't left ammunition on the floor?

Additionally, due to various restrictions in the UI, the program might feel needlessly clumsy. If you have a box in your shopping cart and an item in the box, there is no polite way to get the item without disturbing everything and upsetting the box's contents. It's definitely possible to make the case for having all of your essential gear within easy reach, as well as all of your equipment that you'll need for setting up camp on the cart, but that simply seems like needless additional mental gymnastics.

I believe NEO Scavenger is excessively difficult in another aspect, which is by making inventory navigation difficult (which is such a big part of this game). The process of separating purified water from unknown water is both cumbersome and risky. If you want to tell if you've drank the whole bottle, you'll have to dump it into your inventory, check the water, and then put it back in the bottle if you didn't complete it. To keep track of which bottles of water were boiled versus lake water, I had to develop a quirky system, but it seems like a simpler approach would've been to color the bottles differently based on which type of water they contained (which is already done by the game, as you'll notice from the different bottle colors).

The tiniest of my complaints is merely for realism's sake. It's no problem to me that I battle hybrids of humans and dogs, or wraiths, or other things that may be unique to the setting. I mean how a newspaper is as thick as a handgun, or how inadequate it is to manage ammo. With the exception of the weapon's capacity, every shot requires ammo. Thus, I only get to equip two of one type of arrow to my bow, and the other four merely sit in my inventory until the combat is done. (In other situations, it's essentially a death sentence, because you could be forced to use your inventory mid-fight.)

I believe Neo Scavenger is a fantastic simulation that pays homage to micromanagement while offering a crafting system one of the greatest I've seen, period. The game is plenty with material, and it accomplishes making the option seem consequential by having wrong choices lead to pain or the return to a previous point. However, after having my brain experience the smallest of stumbles in a crucial moment when replaying this scenario 16 times in a row, I'm not sure whether I'd want to inflict this anxiety on someone who enjoys figuring out the optimal route over and again.