App Review: Wilderness Survival

Here's a game with a difference. It's not an RPG, there are almost zero animations and definitely no fancy storyline.

I'm pleased to present the unimaginatively-named Wilderness Survival. Its creator is a dude by the name of Juuso Hietalahti and it started as a little project on the Google Play Store. I played it years ago in its infancy, donated a few dollars towards its development and watched it grow to the beast it is today.

The Premise

You, the player, are in some kind of predicament. In Easy Mode, your car has broken down in the middle of a storm and you need to make your way to safety. In harder modes, you need to trek your way through increasingly hostile terrain. In all cases, hunger, cold, dehydration and poisoning are your constant enemy... and that's if you don't meet wild beasts.

On the way to survival, you will need to examine your inventory often to ensure that your equipment is conducive to your survival - clean drinking water, food, fire-starting materials, rope and so on. You'll also have to create or procure this equipment from the surrounding terrain.

The Aesthetics

This game is visually grim. The colors are stark shades of orange, brown and black. It's stylish, but also not very inviting and deliberately so. Really puts you in the mood.

The hand-drawings of your equipment can come off as really basic, but it fits the theme superbly.

The Experience

This game is really basic, and unless you have some allergy to reading, pretty damn fun. It's like reading a book of your survival, as you make choice after choice. There are immersive elements too, so if you're an obsessive type of reader, this could be for you.

The Interface

It's all tapping on various options to bring you to the next interface. Nothing else required. In fact, it's very much inventory management with a ticking clock in the background.

What I liked

Difficulty levels. You get to ease yourself into the game without being overwhelmed by the several options available to you.

 

 

As in probably any survival scenario, luck plays a huge part. Make the wrong choice and you die. Make the correct choice and you might still die. There are so many ways to perish in this game - starvation, hypothermia, dehydration, to name a few - that you very rarely get a chance to catch your metaphorical breath.

 

The challenges. One of my main gripes used to be that there were very few. Fast forward a couple years later, there's a decent amount of these to meet.

The atmosphere is terrific, what with sound, vibration and the screen turning red to show you that you're in deep shit and the game isn't fucking around. No, really. Play with sound on, yo.

Item creation combinations to get all sorts of cool survival shit. This is like 80% of the game right there.

Things getting done slower and with a higher failure rate when you're low on energy. Intense!

It's a small download. Easy on your battery life, too.

What I didn't

It's possible for a lake to run out of fish in just a couple days from a single fisherman?! Come on.

There's next to no clue as to where to go next. I mean, a friggin' compass and a general direction would be nice. Instead, all we get is terrain descriptions and a distance.

All that fishing and trap-setting and water-gathering can get repetitive. But I guess it's an unavoidable part of the whole survival shtick.

You may find all that inventory management tiresome. It's certainly not for everyone.

Conclusion

Wilderness Survival can be an annoying game to play at times especially if you hate inventory management. But there's just something charmingly basic about the entire concept. Should be good for a few days (or even weeks) of gameplay while you figure out how to not die in the game.

My Rating

7 / 10

Give it a go. You'll have a wild time.
T___T