SCAVS

SCAVS

First, to get it out of the way: this game has the kind of flowery but generic, emotional but not the right emotional text that I have seen a lot more in the last year or two popping up:

(these are all from different parts of the game)

Jyn: And then, it starved in the very home that had let it thrive. Now there's just this: the ghost of a butterfly's wing, reaching out… I guess everything turns to dust here.

The land has begun to change. It's less volcanic, more sandstone and granite. Beautiful streaks of something here, almost crystalline, flecked with glints of purple… quartz maybe? Cracks run down the side. This place is being torn apart in slow-motion. Rapid freeze-thaw cycles have worn and eroded it away. The floor is covered with stones as if the mountain is just crumbling from old age. I guess none of that matters much – it's not Helium-3. But it's still interesting, right?

Jyn: Oh this feels eerie, and… kinda lonely. Giant mechanical monsters, all left to die. Great steel armatures looming out at strange angles. Like a giant construct just keeled over. Everything abandoned, twisted, corroded, and left creaking in the wind. Feels like… like the planet won. Everything dies eventually, doesn't matter how much Helium-3 there is around. This is what's left of us when everything's taken away.

Jyn: My mind… slides away because it knows where that leads. Pain drowns happiness – it's like a deep, black ocean and happiness can't swim.

There's nothing wrong with the writing, but after a while I came to realize that none of it really meant anything, so I could skim through without reading closely.

Beyond that, there's a lot of fun about this game. There is a cool opening intro with a spinning planet, and a dynamic notification system and map. Some parts of the system didn't quite make sense; for instance, we get alerts that there are new data logs, but clicking on the alerts doesn't send us to the logs, which would have been easy to do. The messages box only appears when new messages come in, so once you dismiss it you can't read new messages, but when it reappears it still has all the old ones.

The game helps you a lot, with a map that upgrades over time and a list of points of interest.

The story is about you, an operator, commanding two different scavengers to pick up helium from the planet. You are told not to form an emotional attachment to them and are warned for doing so, but they frequently try to talk to you. This is played entirely straight, so there's definitely a 'good path' and a 'bad path'.

As you play and as you disobey orders, the backstories of the people involved slowly are unravelled until you reach a dramatic conclusion. There is a big twist. I don't know if it completely made sense, but I may need to replay.

I most enjoyed unlocking and exploring different areas of the map and creating new connections. That felt fun. The game also did a good job differentiating in the map exploration of the two main characters.

Overall, this felt like a very polished game based on well-worn tropes with a sprinkle of imaginative creative direction over the top. I wouldn't mind seeing more games like this or that had some of the fancier features of this game.