Everyone who said that the survival genre is dead had to keep quiet after the release of SCUM, the ultra-realist game published by Devolver Digital that turned into an instant hit. Last Oasis, in development by the Donkey Crew team, is proposed as a survival game with an absolutely original imprint on the genre. Let's find out why.
In Last Oasis, set in a world of undefined times, the Earth is hit by a catastrophic event: the axis of rotation is stationary and the planet no longer turns on itself, transforming half of the planet in the dark into a frozen desert and the one under the sun into an arid desert. The only habitable place remains the thin strip of land on the meridian halfway between the two hemispheres.
There is a problem: the planet still revolves around the sun, therefore the habitable zone does not remain stable. The solution? What remains of humanity has created a gigantic city of movable wood, called Flotilla, which continues to move. There are those who do not live permanently inside Flotilla, or the Nomads, who control land ships moved by the winds and travel around the lands in search of resources to be collected before the sun reaches them.
The first thing that catches the eye in Last Oasis is its visual style: if on the one hand the world and the nomads seem almost to have come out of the Bronze Age, the mobile wooden machines look like aberrations of Leonardo Da Vinci's Renaissance projects, giving the game its own identity far from anything else on the market. All powered by the Unreal Engine 4 graphics engine.
We couldn't play the game but had a chat with Lucas Stannis, producer of the title, who explained the gameplay. The classic survival component - looking for resources, producing equipment, building bases - is enriched by the construction of mobile bases, which lead us to talk about combat: the bases, in addition to functioning as a means of transport, are in fact real vessels that can be equipped with harpoons , bolts and cannons to face all the dangers of the area and, above all, other nomads willing to appropriate our loot. What we've seen of ship combat is vaguely reminiscent of titles like Guns of Icarus, while when you go ashore (or boarding), the combat mechanics with bows and sidearms are reminiscent of Mount & Blade.
We don't have much more information for now, but be aware that developers often release beta keys on their Discord channel, and that the intention is to release Last Oasis in Early Access within one or two years at the latest.
