But there are other differences that further separates TLD from the other games, and that into a lower tier. Subnautica (in particular) and Breathedge look amazing, they're a graphics whore's wet dream. TLD... is not. It has a low-poly art style, and an even worse character art style that only Ron Gilbert could love. The story centers around two white persons, Will and Astrid, and their skin is alabaster white... while their noses are flesh-toned. Ugh. (You have no idea how relieved I was when I found a balaclava, as it gave me the luxury of not having to look at Will's stupid clownworld-face ever again.) In-game models range from 'Good' to 'Cheap', and the latter goes for every tree in the game - of which there are only a few thousand.
The game's biggest lure is the setting and the premise: The year is 201X and takes place in one of the most remote and hostile regions on the planet, largely abandoned by the Canadian government after an economic collapse, and then having an EMP-esque event take place at the start of the game that kills all electrics - that sounds very interesting to me, yes. I made the foolish mistake of picking the 'Easy' difficulty level, but since that's the recommended difficulty level for people like myself who've never played the game before, I had some bizarre moments happen. The game harps on about how wolves are dangerous... yet not a single wolf ever tried to attack me. They took one whiff of me and ran off yelping. (I reckon they were thinking "That man has a clown face, clowns taste funny, avoid!")
I was faced with two gameplay choices: Storyline and Survival. As Survival seemed to be only against the clock, and not with a reachable end goal of 'rescue', I thought I'd start the Storyline first to get a better feel for the game. And boy, does the Storyline-mode love to hold your hand through everything. And it's through that hand-holding that I realized one thing early on... the UI is atrociously bad. It's clearly a placeholder, and while it does get things done there are SO many ways it can be improved (some other colors in the UI beyond white would be a good start) but there's no sign that the devs have any intent on improving it. Pop-up tips came and went telling me what I needed to do, but rarely how I was supposed to do them, and the UI did its best to prevent me from viewing those tips again.
But slowly, but surely, I figured out how to play this game, and started having some fun with it. I established a base of operations and launched expeditions into various directions of the map, with little or no knowledge of what I would find. I learned how to craft the essentials needed, how to secure food sources and how the game mechanics work. There's a very elaborate code running in this game concerning temperatures and how wind affects it, and how your gear counters it. Hypothermia is the player's greatest enemy, and much of the game's focus is on dealing with it. The game also has code for items that give off a smell that attracts predators - not many games think to take smell into account, but this one seems to.
Eventually I progressed far enough to get out of the first area, and that's when I realized TLD makes another critical error - there are Points of No Return. Once you go down that rope in Milton, you're not coming back. If you were like a sensible player of games of this genre, you had a base of operations set up there with gear and resources. Well, kiss all that goodbye, the game will only allow you to carry with you what you can hold without getting encumbered. And to cut a long story short, the same thing happens in Episode 2. More on that later.
Episode 2 in general is a more open experience - close to thrice the playing area, different environments and more hazards to contend with. One cool new addition is the Aurora Event - sometimes at night the northern lights come out and change the game into this mystical realm where everything electric comes to life in flickering lights - and scattered electric cables suddenly become a life-threatening hazard. I spent several nights in-game just staring up at the sky (and one night in that watchtower) - it's that cool to see and is in direct (positive) contrast with the game's general appearance.
But it's also in Episode 2 that the hand-holding goes into overdrive. In Episode 2 you meet a trapper who's having bear troubles. Not many bears, just the one. The Old Bear. I quickly learned to call him the Plot Bear, because he only appears when the plot requires him to. Like when you need to visit three signal towers to progress the story, the Plot Bear seems to know to be there at the last two towers, waiting for you. (It doesn't matter in what order you reach each tower, he's always at the last two you visit.) Here the game pulls a double foul, because not only is the entire fight QTE-based, but an essential tool tip waits until the bear is actually attacking before revealing itself, meaning that there's a 99% chance every single player will die to the bear's first attack as they either don't know what they're supposed to do, or they're distracted by the tool tip. Great game design there. *golfclap*
Another horrible thing that happens is that the game now teleports the player about when the plot requires it. Episode 2 starts with you emerging from a cave to find the aforementioned trapper fighting the Plot Bear. After this cutscene the game teleports you to the trapper's cabin, meaning you lose track of where you entered onto this new map. This then happens a few more times, but the worst one is when you finish a certain 'one-use' subsection on one map, only to be magically teleported from that map to another map, and directly into the trapper's cabin! A ~12-minute journey under the best of conditions, skipped because *reasons*. (That whole subsection is a travesty BTW, and seemingly only added in because they couldn't think of anything better.) Neither Subnautica or Breathedge ever did this.
(A glaring contradiction within the game needs to be pointed out here: The game explains and tool-tips you with a lot of information about how the game and game world works. One of those is the ice - almost all bodies of water are frozen solid, and while we generally know that ice can break from underneath, the game uses two entire maps to show us that it doesn't. I even ran across Mystery Lake a couple of times, and the ice only creaked at best. So the ice doesn't break in this game; precedent established. Then I enter the 'Forlorn Muskeg'-map, and learn the hard way (because the game didn't give me any advance warning or tool-tip) that the ice can break underneath you, with life-threatening results. And wouldn't you know it, the breakable ice is purposefully placed to limit the player's movement across that map, it's not just some random event that can happen.)
But the final nail in the coffin for me was the end of Episode 2. To end the episode a dilapidated dam must be entered and successfully navigated internally to reach the other side. Fair enough, except it's full of electrical gizmos, and the latter half of the map can't be reached without using the elevator, which requires electricity, meaning it won't run except during an Aurora Event, which means all the other electrics become a hazard. I made a call then and there, and immediately after emerging from the elevator I pulled out a bedroll and slept until dawn. I then crossed the rest of the thinly-disguised obstacle course in front of me without incident as the Aurora Event had passed.
That's not the straw that broke the camel's back.
A few years ago I tried out a game called Outlast, which is a horror game about a reporter investigating an insane asylum, with a huge emphasis on immersion. That immersion was immediately destroyed for me when I, as I do whenever I play horror games, checked every single corner for hostiles and found no one about. Then, as I had to 'use' a scenery obstacle to progress further, a cutscene triggered where a fat, demented inmate comes out of literally fucking nowhere from behind and throws me over the rail to the floor below, then immediately disappears without a trace. When that same sack of shit pulled the same trick a few minutes later, I uninstalled that game and haven't looked back since. Because it breaks the flow and feel of the game.
Can you guess what happens at the end of Episode 2? Yes, that exact thing. I entered a room, checked every corner, no one around. I look through a doorway into another room, no one there, no one looking to ambush me. I enter the room, *THUD*, I'm struck on the head from behind by someone who couldn't possibly be there, except by *magic*. A cutscene follows, then Episode 2 ends.
I start Episode 3, and find out I'm playing as Astrid this time. This fills me with a sense of dread, so I quit and check online to see how Episode 4 starts. Yes, you play as Mackenzie again in Ep 4. No, you don't get to keep any gear you gathered from the first two episodes. Worse than that, sources claim the game *resets* Mackenzie's inventory so that he's back into his starting clothes - clothes which I had torn into cloth strips ages ago as I had found better clothes to wear.
So we have a 'Bait and Switch'-scenario combined with Points of No Return, magical storytelling tools and complete disregard for the player's in-game accomplishments. That's a perfect recipe to detract people like me from your game, thank-you-very-much.
On a final whim, trying to salvage something from TLD, I decided to look into Survival Mode. I figured it might be worth a shot to give it a go once, but then I came across a dev blog outlining the future of TLD: They plan to make Survival Mode a subscription-based service. That's an instant 'NO' for me.
