Even the videogame industry, albeit in small steps, is trying to raise public awareness on environmental pollution by orienting itself towards more ecological choices - as far as possible - such as, for example, recyclable cases for DVDs and so on. A Belgian software house, under the name of Pajama Llama Games, following in the footsteps of the ecologist, has recently released - in early access - Flotsam, an indie survival game with management aspects set in a possible future where the planet Earth, due to global warming, is now almost completely submerged by the waters. To survive you will have to rely on your organizational spirit and on recycling of various types of waste that you will find along your way.
Flotsam will then put you in the shoes of a small initial group of three men who find themselves in the middle of the ocean on a small platform, which serves as the city center, with few supplies and few building materials.. The survival of each component of your colony will be based on basic needs such as water, food, fatigue and health. It is on these four parameters that Flotsam gameplay mainly revolves and on which you will have to pay your greatest attention. Around your base you will initially find piles of floating waste such as logs or other objects made of wood or plastic materials. Wood waste, once recovered, they must be left for some time to dry in the sun and subsequently they can be used, for example, as firewood to distil salt water and transform it into drinking water or to produce ropes. Plastic waste instead they will be reusable to produce for example fishing or exploration boats, accommodation, platforms on which to deposit waste waiting to be used or simple walkways useful to enlarge your floating city.
By recovering and accumulating plastic and wood from the marine surface you will then be able to build even more complex objects useful for optimizing and facilitating the vital process of your colony which, we repeat, will be expandable at will through plastic walkways to which it will also be possible to connect production workshops or docks for mooring boats. The latter will prove to be of great use as the primary food source present in Flotsam will obviously be the fish that, present in schools, it will be possible to first fish and then, once dried or cooked, will become food for your workers.
In the early stages of the game, after building an exploration boat, you will find on a small island the remains of a destroyed ship from which it will be possible to recover some very useful objects including a see her. At this point your floating city will be able to harness the wind and move to other areas of the ocean. The navigation on the ocean surface will not be totally free but will be guided, almost in stages, and will allow you to discover islands, rescue shipwrecked people to integrate into your colony, recover large quantities of wood, plastic or food and even metal objects. Yes, because, from time to time, you will come across old semi-submerged bridges crowded with abandoned cars obviously no longer usable and from which you will obtain metal parts or even oil.
Like wood and plastic, metal can also be recycled and, through special laboratories, will give you the opportunity to build objects useful for the survival and development of your colony. Not only that: from time to time, by exploring special game areas, it will be possible to accumulate research points can be used to unlock more advanced technologies such as desalinators, fishing nets or industrial-style kitchens, all while respecting nature and obviously without any kind of pollution.
In Flotsam, being still in early access, there is still no main story to follow or objectives, other than to keep your castaways alive for as long as possible. The progress in the game is quite linear: there is no day-night cycle as there are no atmospheric events or simply unexpected events that can change the style of play or make everything more exciting. Moving the floating colony through the various game areas is also a bit too simple and linear. There will always be two or three areas to choose from while moving and some will not be reachable only with your inseparable sail: you will need to collect oil cans, but nothing more. On the contrary, when you finish exploring the various areas, you will always return, in spite of yourself, to the first area you originally started from.
Flotsam gameplay uses the Unity game engine and, although still to be fixed in some purely managerial aspects, it works well and is well balanced just like the learning curve which, by gradually introducing the various construction mechanics for survival, makes general learning and management of resources - human and non - present in the game pleasant. As mentioned above your main tasks will be to regulate and organize the life of your marine agglomeration by paying attention to the vital parameters of the inhabitants and therefore to meet their needs in terms of food, water, fatigue and health. Leaving out one of these priorities will most likely mean a premature end to your adventure.
Flotsam also convinces from the graphic point of view of the various game menus, always very clean and never confusing. The various building structures, as well as the islands and the scenarios, are in cartoon style, all hand-drawn and of excellent quality compared to other productions of this type. The same cannot be said of the castaways under our control who, although well differentiated from each other, did not seem up to par with the general graphic quality. The same goes for the animations, which as regards for example the ocean or the various structures in the moments in which they are used are fun and beautiful to see, while for the characters they are quite basic. Even the sound sector did not seem so exceptional: the background music, although relaxing, becomes repetitive in the long run and the various effects do not scream a miracle. Finally, it should be noted that Flotsam is translated entirely and (almost) perfectly into Spanish, definitely a plus for a low budget production like this game.
Flotsam has already received several awards and prizes such as the Rising Star Award at Gamescom 2018 and Best Unity Game at Gamescom 2019 and is available in version early access for PC via Steam at the price of 22,99 euros. Perhaps a little too high for a title that promises very well but which, at the moment, still seems to us quite incomplete and excessively repetitive.
Flotsam is, although still in the early access version, an overall interesting game. The guys from Pajama Llama have done an excellent job so far in terms of graphics and gameplay and, considering that the definitive version of Flotsam will be released in 2020, it could become a must-have for all fans of strategic and management games. It deals with important issues and rides the ecological wave that is slowly affecting the whole world, including the videogame one. At the moment the price is perhaps a bit excessive compared to the contents it offers, but we hope that interesting innovations will be introduced in the future including, first of all, a story line to follow or greater freedom of action with improvement of the micro-management phase . If you are a fan of management games and don't mind the survival genre either, you can still try to build your colony with recycled materials while we, in the meantime, will keep you updated on any developments in the game.
► Flotsam is an indie-Simulation-Strategy game for PC and Steam, The release is planned: TBA
