About five hours later Icarus, the new survival game from Day Z et al’s Dean Hall, I’ve had some time. I had just been ravaged by a bear, and had jogged back to my corpse from the respawn drop ship a few miles away. It was dark, and also stormy, and also more bears. I desperately need to find and get my pack full of meat, tools, and construction supplies back, which is proving difficult as your corpse just shows up as a small, indistinguishable pile of brown sandbags. With each passing minute, my mind flashed back to the time I spent half an hour searching for my wireless headphones amid the squalls of rain on Brighton beach, shivering and still soaking wet from a morning swim. Soon. The experience is so horrible that it transcends mere discomfort and turns into an amusing farce to some extent.
That’s Icarus, that is. It’s obviously flawed, extremely frustrating, and often cranky, but somehow it was good enough to keep me playing until early morning for many nights without even realizing the time. It resembles Schrodinger’s cat, except that the cat is a bear made from thirst gauges. I continue to spend another 20 hours (mostly) happily within its reach.
It helps that my Icarus playstyle is ‘arrogant’. During those 20 hours, I flirted, then suffered disaster lurking in countless ways, from not bothering to place respawn beds, to pounding live watermelons. known would give me food poisoning. I died of thirst, suffocation, contact, and falls (ah, hit). I had skimmed through woods, deserts, and blizzards without proper preparation, not long before, and as a result couldn’t succumb to claws, teeth, and tusks. But mostly I died because of the bear.
Instead of the great survival on which most tree cutting depends on you, Icarus is divided into individual quests. You fall into a hostile environment on the alien planet Icarus (but for some reason Earth-like), creating whatever you think you need to achieve a traffic goal. through some bland jokes, then dodge. Each quest must be completed within a certain number of hours or your character will be stuck forever, losing access to all your blueprints and unlocked talents. That means you’ll be back moving and gathering resources at the slowest possible rate, while being hungry and thirsty the fastest – along with not being able to craft anything but the engine starter. copy. I believe the timer keeps going even when you’re not playing, which is a bit rude for anyone who can’t reliably commit to playing a certain amount for a certain amount of time. In fact, every quest I’ve done has a multi-day time limit but can be completed within an evening, so I’ve never felt close to failing. Even with all those dying.
The main trick of Icarus (essay) is to hang small, achievable goals in front of you, then pave the way for them with wolves and weather. “Tsk tsk! I don’t need iron tools just to get to that geographic point,” you’d think wrong. “I could cross the North Pole with just a bunch of rags and a curtain for shelter,” you’ll say stupidly. “I’ve got enough arrows to fight the wild animals that signed up to build this hunting cabin,” you’ll whimper, dying.
You get the idea. You always want to take the shortest route, dashing toward those goals as countless video games have trained you to do – but Icarus is a game of preparation, and it will make you sick to your stomach for moving too much. fast. Or at least, it happens if you’re playing alone, like I was. That’s partly because obviously having an extra lance-wielding monster or two on your side, but mostly because the punishment for respawning (as opposed to being resurrected) can be downright brutal. Each death in solo play wipes out all your XP progress on the next level, which could easily represent half an hour of gameplay or more, which you may or may not want to replace with the word ‘Work’.
I would go as far as to say that covering death in a grim cloak of consequences is in fact the defining part of Icarus.
It made sense, but Icarus helped me invest. Early on, the growl of a nearby bear induces instant fear, and few games have me as desperate as the wolves/wild boars/elements close in. The consequent is the defining part of Icarus. I was once crushed to death by a tree I just cut down trying to ‘safely’ get my last XP, and I literally howled. Still, it was a pain in my ass that I had to grudgingly respect, and I doubt whether the frustration that excites you to beat the damn thing or push you away will make or break Icarus solo. for you.
The other decisive part of Icarus was the storms. They are very powerful. They are absolute. The rain lashed the woods, while the wind knocked trees to the ground, or your head, causing death or at least temporary brain damage. The desert sandstorm almost completely obscures your view, leaving you to wander hopelessly into cougars while losing water/melting from the simultaneous heatwave. Snowstorms in the Arctic are scary enough to warrant a story.
My mission was to take three parts of a hurricane-proof gizmo from across the Arctic, then protect it from the elements while it beeps a bit. After many grueling trips, ravaged by numerous polar bear-related deaths, I got this device. I was in the process of pulling it back to the relative safety of the woods when the storm hit, freezing me to death and I had no choice but to build my pathetic shelter right away. in which.
I slammed into the tiniest of shelters, lit a campfire in the middle of it – then realized I was still freezing to death, because that turned out to be no match for a bloody blizzard. Luckily, that didn’t matter, because then I immediately caught fire and burned my insides, suddenly delightfully. Undeterred, I ran straight back, a gap in the storm that allowed me to fix the walls and widen enough that I could place both storm posts and campfires without me having to step in. I’ve sat through the 10% required to beep before the next storm hits. The snow was thick and my roof was obscured. I started taking it back into the woods – then bumped into another polar bear, which spooked me into a trail, which I plunged before breaking my leg and dying of suffocation.
In many ways, Icarus was a triumph. Like Day Z, it’s adept at weaving stories out of its system, where a hasty decision sends you down a winding road to disaster. The gathering inside that dilapidated shelter really gives a sense of transport in a way that games have always aimed for but often failed to achieve. It’s gorgeous, deceptively absorbing, and makes for the fundamentals – as Ed said, axes are a prime example. Over and over again isn’t half as annoying as it sounds, because each time it’s accelerated by a combination of talents and an improved understanding of exactly what’s going on. what you need. Everyone knows the best part of survival games is the beginning, and this is a pretty tricky way to get you running over and over again through that familiar, basic dopamine glove.
But. Buuuuuuut. The jank.
Animals are the main offenders. They get stuck easily, as well as getting stuck in and out of rocks. I have successfully slaughtered pigs even when they were doing their attack animation a few meters away, I saw the tree jump into the sky and I had countless painful interactions with crafting stations that indicated they were working. is under the shelter (and therefore usable). I slipped off the ladder, was blocked from view by broken objects, and broke my ankle when I stepped over a log. Worse, I was dismayed when I discovered that taking the steps to a goal out of order simply broke the task. After investing a few hours in building a route up river land (an unusually interesting goal, incidentally), I realized I was wasting my time because I hadn’t caught on. an earlier lighthouse. It was remarkable how quickly my desire to play beyond that moment disappeared.
It’s hard to feel threatened when you’re basically Hawkeye.
The battle is also a bit in a flash. The technique I eventually discovered for dealing with bears was nothing more than a desperate, frantic struggle and more of an endurance test of reliably running diagonally forward. I depended on timing for the bears to slide past me and I was able to plug them in with another arrow before rinsing and repeating. I also feel the auto-target can be a bit too generous, because after an hour or two of practice, I find myself reliably shooting straight at animals from a ridiculous distance. It’s hard to feel threatened when you are basically Hawkeye.
Unlocked trees can be frustrating, with substantial perks drowned out under individual +5% forage buffs, and certain blueprints feel useless (I beg you, don’t). preoccupation with unlocking poison arrows). I also disagree conceptually with -10% XP debuffs, certain storms and illnesses cause you to suffer. There’s even a currency tied to completing quests that allows you to carry certain items between drops, which I didn’t mind as it was stingy to the point of being almost irrelevant. Perhaps I could have spent more wisely, but it still took me 25 hours to work my way towards a mildly improved living environment.
However, Icarus’ biggest failure is that it doesn’t accept aliens. I was hoping it lulled me into a false sense of security, waiting to ambush with unsettling extraterrestrial encounters properly, but the only non-terrestrial threat I’ve seen so far Now some worms spray poison. Fear of the unknown is a rich resource, which survival games fail to exploit when in danger. If Icarus (iziziz) is still holding back, and the wildlife is on quests I haven’t unlocked, it’s been holding back too long.
With all that bare, I’m really confused about how much I enjoyed my time with Icarus. It relies on repetitive loops and often uncomfortable hiking, on tedious penalties and grueling goals. I’m not a patient person, and that’s enough. Storms have terrible atmospheres, the basic crafting still feels appealing the eleventh time you do it, and oh, I haven’t even mentioned how it models the individual planks upside down knead and get stuck together when you chop a wall. . Although very complex, Icarus’s system showed meticulousness, on both large and small scales.
Most importantly, when he slapped me, I found myself wanting to slap him back rather than walk away – for the most part. Once I recovered from the knockout punch that was my canceled waterfront expedition, I might even be able to go back. I just hope there are less errors.
