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Rogue Harvest is an indie rogue-like game from Genetix Studios. It challenges you to survive in a procedurally generated world by gathering resources, crafting items, growing and killing food and most importantly making sure that you have shelter for the night.
The game itself has been out in Steam Early Access now for over two months, having released November 5th 2015. The studio’s plan is to keep the game in Early Access for a few months to have people play it and give feedback so that they can improve the game before they do a full release. So, how does it stand up?
Rogue Harvest is actually quite bug-free as I played it, with the only ones I noticed being the popping of 3 achievements just as I was loading in the maps the first two times (the 3 Mushroom Massacre achievements you get for killing certain numbers of the Mushkin enemies) without me having met the conditions. That being said wandering around the world you did often find dropped mushrooms in the midst of blood splatters so maybe the world generation has a thing against Mushkins?
Rogue Harvest is also quite a difficult game. You do start with 3 tools that never wear out, but other tools you craft as well as helmets/hoods all have a durability and so do walls as you’ll find out. You do start the game with a small hut to provide some shelter during the nights, but as monsters can easily chew through walls you’ll find out very quickly that a one layer wall is not enough to keep you safe at night. Although you do get warning that night is falling and have a handy day-night clock in the top-right corner it is easy to get yourself lost in the world and be caught outside, and if that happens you just need to keep running. Outrunning the monsters is possible and when day comes most of them will retreat again, just be very careful where you’re running lest you get jumped from the front. Of course, death is permadeath in this game as it is a rogue-like so if you value your crops and tools you need to be careful what you do.
Resource-wise there’s a fair bit you can do. You’ll find wild carrots, potatoes and other veg that you can bash to gain the vegetable to eat/cook or a seed to plant that crop yourself or potentially both at once. Trees are plentiful and most give a good few logs as well as leaves which I suggest gathering a lot of to snack on and keep your energy (hunger bar) stocked up. Stone ore comes most often in little chunks on the ground but you can find big cliffsides of stone, as well as ores and sometimes big chunks of marble that you can all use for crafting. Charcoal is one of the more important items, as crafting the Oven which makes your food restore more energy needs 4 pieces of it. To get it though you need to burn down trees, and you can’t really craft anything to do it yourself without spending resources on a fire wand that you could use for other things instead. Fire flower enemies are the best way to go about the task, but watch that you don’t get caught in the fireballs instead. Burning damage is a thing in this game, along with poison damage.
However, where it’s let down a little bit is that currently there’s not really a lot to craft or do. There is going to be a story implemented fully into the game upon release, but for the moment the only parts of it come during the intro cutscene, flashbacks you can generate upon touching random strange objects you can come across (like a sign to a hospital, a plane rotor etc.) and the dialogue boxes you seem to get at preset play times during the game. There’s three crafting lists of things to make, but that’s counting the upgraded picks, axes and swords as well as all the helmets/hoods and you can only wear one of those at a time. Speaking of helmets, currently the game doesn’t have any armour slot system which means that equipping your hood/helmet is from your inventory and that takes up a space you could be using for another thing.
The studio did tweet about a week ago that they’re working on end game content for the game though, so soon there will be more things added to the game. More items, more things to craft, more loot and the full story.
Starting work on the end of game sequence for #RogueHarvest if the game doesn’t hit you emotionally, I’ve failed as an #indiedev
If you’re interested in giving the game a go, you can find it now priced at £4.79 for UK Steam people, and $5.99 for the US. I’d say it was worth that much, because despite the lack of craftable things right now, the rogue-like element does add some replayability to the game which is worth five pounds/six dollars in my opinion.
Having teased on their Twitter yesterday that something new for Cities Skylines was coming, today Paradox have revealed their second expansion to their popular city-building game: Cities Skylines – Snowfall.
As their previous expansion added a day and night cycle to the game, Snowfall will be adding a weather system to the game allowing for rain and snow as well as a new temperature reading that will have residents huddling up for warmth. It’ll add a new mechanic to the game – making sure that your city is able to be kept warm enough during the times when the weather outside is terrible and keeping roads clear when the snow starts to pile up.
The expansion will also add some new transportation options to the game, including trams which were a much demanded fan-favourite to be implemented into the game next. Managing transport routes has also been made easier to do and a snowplow service can be called upon to clear roads that have a build up of snow upon them. There will also be wintery new parks and other attractions added to help draw your residents and tourists from miles around, as well as a new Chirp #yeahthereare.
Some of the cosmetic weathers such as rain and fog will be added to the original game free of charge in an update around the time that Snowfall releases along with other yet-to-be-announced features, and the expansion will be coming to Windows, Mac and Linux computers sometime later this year.
Oh boy. January 19th, 2016 is going to be a great day if you like RPGs, rogue-lites, horror or any combination of them. Red Hook studios is releasing Darkest Dungeon on the 19th, and they’ve put out a sweet new trailer to tease us all. For those that don’t know, Darkest Dungeon is a gorgeously hand crafted dungeon crawling rouge-lite. Part members can go insane with unpredictable effects, the risk reward is off the charts thanks to permanent death, and even the amount of gear you take into a dungeon with you is an often agonizing decision. We here at the station have put a ton of hours into the early access version, and we’re practically salivating over the thought of a finished game. But until then, wipe your chin off and gaze at this trailer.
So, soon the latest Far Cry game will be out. Far Cry Primal takes everything back to the beginnings of human society, with the emphasis put onto whatever you can craft with your hands, tribal decor and wild animal companions. And to promote the game which will release at the end of February, Ubisoft are running a contest for one lucky winner and a friend to… spend a night in a cave.
… No. Seriously. I’m not making this up.
The cave itself is located in France in the Pyrénées area and apparently staying in the cave isn’t cheap. Here’s the layout of the trip’s events:
Day 1 – Sunday January 30th 2016: travel from the airport nearby residency place to Lourdes-Tarbes Airport, France.
Night 1- Sunday January 30th 2016: stay in an hotel in Lourdes city.
Day 2 – Monday February 1st 2016: transportation by car to the cave and survival training (discovery of techniques and methods in the wildlife).
Night 2 – Monday February 1st 2016: night in the cave.
Day 3 – Tuesday February 2nd 2016: travel back (transportation from the cave to the airport/train station + flight/train).
So, a little bit more than just plonking two people in a cave for a night. All costs for accomodation, travel, transport and catering costs are being paid for by the sponsor and Ubisoft have estimated it’ll cost €2,800 which is a fair bit.
If this sounds like your cup of tea then you can enter their prize draw by tweeting the official Far Cry Primal Twitter with the #cavebnb tag and briefly saying why you should win the contest. Simple.
With all the VR hype that’s going around right now, it’s easy to forget that honestly this generation of VR headsets is only just beginning. No matter how excited we are for them, there are going to be things that they could do a lot better.
Case in point, a presentation delivered by Microsoft’s Bruce Harris from the Tel Aviv business event about their upcoming Hololens suggested that its battery life really isn’t going to be that long. It’s going to have one of just 5.5 hours, but that’s only if you’re doing things like reading e-mail or messing around with Word documents. With more “intensive use” the battery will only last an estimated 2.5 hours. That includes all the 3D demonstrations of the headset’s use that Microsoft has been using as their big wow factor at events.
There was a recording of the presentation up on Youtube earlier, but it’s already been taken down. Still, it’s interesting information to have because the HoloLens is not one of the headsets we’ve had a lot of details about so far. Harris also pointed out that the device has “no option for a wired connection” so it seems that you can’t even choose to charge it up while you use it.
Given that the HoloLens doesn’t have a wired connection option and again the fact that VR tech is only just taking off right now, its short battery life is not really an unexpected thing. It just feels a little bit limiting that the really cool stuff can only be played with for so long before you need to recharge it.
