Neo Scavenger - Review @ RPG Codex

The Codex has reviewed the post apocalyptic survival rogue-like Neo Scavenger: Some snippets:

Apparently, the world has gone to hell while you slept, and so you must set on a journey to find some answers. Why were you frozen? What's your name? What happened to the world? And where can you find some clothes?

Since you begin the game barefoot, wearing only a hospital gown and a strange necklace, you'll probably want to begin by finding an answer to that last question. NEO Scavenger features a robust survival system that requires you to regularly eat, drink, sleep, protect yourself from the cold, and treat wounds & diseases. The various bars on the left-hand side of the screen indicate your current condition, and you can bet that the body temperature bar will quickly drop if you waltz half-naked across the wastes half-naked during a rainstorm. To survive, you must find clothing, as well as food & water, tools, and weapons with which to defend yourself.

To do so, you'll traverse the map hex by hex, searching for places to scavenge, while hiding from hostile scavengers, mutants and other horrors. The game is turn-based, and on every turn, you can walk a certain distance, determined by your traits (an Athletic character can walk farther, a Feeble one less) and by the terrain. Plains are easier to cross, while traversing forests or hills will likely take a full turn each. The various terrain types have additional characteristics as well – standing on top of a hill allow you to see farther, forests allow you to hide with ease and to collect berries and wood, rivers, lakes and swamps allow you to collect water (that may or not be potable), and the various city locations and ruins offer places for you to scavenge.

There are various types of city locations on the world map, and each will offer a different set of scavenging opportunities. In ruins, you'll find mostly crumbling apartments and offices, which might contain loot, but whose ceilings might also fall down on your head and injure you. In small towns, you'll find abandoned houses, trailers and storage sheds, with less loot but also less danger. Big cities offer a wide variety of scavenging locations, usually in higher quantity.

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In any survival game that seeks to truly maintain tension, permadeath is almost mandatory. The choice between eating some potentially poisonous berries or enduring starvation for a few more turns while searching for safer food is an intense life-and-death dilemma under these circumstances, something that could never be achieved if you could just eat the berries and reload if they proved themselves poisonous. However, if a game is going to enforce such a harsh punishment for death, it should be designed in such a way that deaths are always fair, a result of a bad decision or of an incapability to provide an adequate solution to a challenge.

That's where things get a bit tricky in NEO Scavenger. Surviving battles, diseases, dehydration and starvation is not as straightforward here as in other games, since there's no status screen showing you your exact state. In other RPGs, it’s usually quite easy to stay safe by doing a bit of math – “poison ticks for 5 seconds/turns, each tick for 3 damage, I still have 18 HP so I’m ok” – but NEO Scavenger doesn’t offer that. Some would call this unfair, but I disagree. The game is forthcoming with information - you know you are dying of hypothermia and must find shelter and heat. It just doesn't tell you how many turns you'll last. If you die, it's still due to your failure to provide an adequate solution.

What really make NEO Scavenger unfair are its quests, and the dead ends and instadeath choices that come with them.

The game's main quest is almost as obfuscated as its mechanics and has a heavy S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like atmosphere. As you travel the wasteland, you'll find old newspapers from which you can try to piece together the events that led to this apocalyptic scenario. And once night falls, your character will see only darkness – except for a glow in the eastern sky, a possible sign of civilization. The world map is huge (though disappointingly empty), and surviving the long walk towards the glow is the first major step in your quest to find out what happened to the world and to yourself.

During this quest you'll face various CYOA-like events, and that's where things get complicated. In tight situations, having the right skills/items and making the correct choices will allow you to survive unharmed – and maybe even get some bonus loot – while a less stellar performance might leave you severely injured, with broken ribs, or even diseased. That's all well and good in a survival game like this. What isn't so good is how making the wrong choices can (and will) outright kill you. For example, at one point midway through the storyline, a character asked me to take one of three trials: Light, Water or Fire. A wrong choice in this event can lead to your death.