Retreat to Enen

[Generic-User]

Genre: Exploration

Year released: 2022

Ross's rating: Unrated

Link to game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556490/Retreat_To_Enen/

Free to play: No

GaaS: No

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

[biosynth8]

I'm going to try this out when it goes on sale.

[DoctorIan7]

It's a solid experience, with dense atmosphere a unique theme of escaping with its mechanics of meditating and building luxury homes.

But it's hurt by the fact that it's a survival game. Even with predators turned off, like bears and snakes, you will still have to worry about poisoning, freezing, and your survival bars draining. Hard to relax and meditate when your draining meters distract you.

 

Still, I recommend it if you like immersive worlds and decent crafting/building features.

And despite its flaws, the meditation feature is still neat in practice, and I like how it says there's no wrong way to meditate.

[biosynth8]

From what I can gather now, the game is too simplistic for it's own good. It wants to be a survival and crafting game with those meditation mechanics slapped on top, but nothing is really deep. 

Your mental bar is just another status you have to keep topping up by looking for the right resources (domes) and waiting for a while. 

I'm most disappointed by the survival mechanics. While there are different kinds of afflictions, like pathogenes and poison, they don't make a different. Any kind of affliction basicly means you die within a day if you don't find a way to treat it. Nothing goes away by itself, so your health bar in this situation is only a timer. Your character also stays fit as a fiddle until the very last moment. You can also only get one condition at a time, so have fun dancing on snakes when you drank bad water.

This wouldn't be so bad if survival games of this kind weren't a dime a dozend nowadays. Many have done similar mechanics and most have done it better.

Well, I'm only some hours in, so I'll post again when I've finished it.