NEO SCAVENGER CODE

Scavenging takes time and carries a degree of risk. I’ve never floundered about for too long before finding water, woods and a few buildings. The map is semi-randomised, with certain story-specific locations always located in certain regions and (I think) a degree of balance in the layout. Wandering around on the world map, you’ll come across settlements but it looks like civilisation went on a massive drinking binge and fell over while you were sleeping. As I remind myself before leaving the house every day, it's time to find some trousers. If it rains and you don’t find (or make) shelter, you’ll probably freeze to death.

If you don’t find clothes by sunset on the first day, you’ll probably freeze to death. Monsters aside, that hospital gown is your real enemy. Neo Scavenger’s world inflicts enough pain and suffering to please even the most zealous follower of Loricatus. A short-sighted insomniac with a metabolism that burns away the energy gained from a meal before he’s managed to swallow the last mouthful. Extra slots can be created by selecting detrimental traits as counterweight and if you’re a masochist of the first water, you could design a character with no positive attributes at all. Skills can be used during specific encounters but they also boost abilities, such as combat, identification and scouting.

NEO SCAVENGER CODE

A hacker might reroute a security code to lock the door, for example. To escape from the dog-man, you’ll use one of the skills chosen when creating your character. It’s a cruel world but, as the first encounter elegantly demonstrates, your character isn’t entirely useless. Will you attempt to flee from the mutant with the soft, swollen cranium, or will you try to burst its bonce by lobbing a rock? Is scrounging for supplies in the ruins of a multi-storey office building a worthwhile risk or would it be better to head into the wilderness? Will eating the unidentified blue berry turn on your rear-tap until you don’t have any blood left? That question is never far away and because the game is fastidiously turn-based, there’s plenty of time to ponder your answer in any given situation. Neo Scavenger explains the dire situation with a couple of paragraphs of text and a couple of images, and then it leaves you to make the first choice of many. It doesn’t even protect your dignity, being one of those bum-revealing tissue-thin gowns that cause me to childishly giggle at even the bleakest hospital-set dramas or apocalyptic horror-shows. Your tissue-thin garment won’t protect you. Neo Scavenger has only just begun and already, something wants to eat you. The claws that it is using to claw at the door also fail to be metaphors. Far from being a metaphorical depiction of terminal illness or the deadly price of health insurance, the monster is a bipedal canine.

There’s a monster clawing at the other side of the door.

Every playthrough of Neo Scavenger begins the same way – you awake, confused and afraid, in a small room within a medical facility. Unlike a reality television star, I mostly die from exposure rather than a lack of it*. I'll be hugely offended if you decide to go and play with that instead of reading all of these words but I'll be sure to remind you of its existence at the end. Neo Scavenger has a large and generous demo. It’s also one of the best single player turn-based RPGs I’ve played for a long time. This is a brutal game about survival in a harsh world. Neo Scavenger is actually the work of a single man, Dan Fedor, and it’s a less lavish production than The Banner Saga. It seems like only a few days since the last write-up of an RPG created by former Bioware developers.

Neo scavenger