DESOLATE
Two years ago Granichny Island became an epicentre of a large-scale disaster of unknown origin. “The New Light” conglomerate covered up this catastrophic event – and now aims to rectify the consequences as much as they can. A massive campaign is underway, during which so-called “Volunteers” – most of whom have never held a weapon in their hands – are sent out onto Granichny. Their mission – to research the paranormal activities of the island, gathering information and undertaking dangerous tasks, all in hope of amending mistakes of the past. None of them are ready for what comes next. Play the role of a Volunteer, and explore a place filled with threats of every shape and size – from monsters and madmen to supernatural anomalies and seemingly impossible weather patterns. Journey through the present of this forsaken world to uncover its secrets.
Game Discussion
Steam User 44
Really interesting/enjoyable game from my perspective so far.
Here are some key things that stood out to me:
This game is heavy on exploration
You're *going* somewhere. Avoid trying to settle in too much until you get to the central hub. You'll know it when you get there because someone will give you a room to sleep in ;)
More Exploration RPG than Survival Game
You gain experience and levels as you complete tasks, defeat enemies, and in other ways. Leveling up generates some skill points from 3 different categories that you can spend on skills. A recommended skill will be highlighted, but you can ignore that recommendation if the other skills seem more interesting to you.
Still Has Some Light Survival Mechanics
They aren't too intense... very easy to learn what to do, so skip this part if you like finding things out on your own!
Food: if you loot a lot of stuff and craft more complex food items when you have the opportunity (at one of the many campfires you find while exploring), your foot stores will easily provide for all of your needs.
Water: you'll see some things that look like water pumps kind of all over the place. Interacting with them will indicate you're "filling" something... but really, it just produces a plastic bottle filled with dirty water. You don't need to have an empty bottle first... take as much as you need and be weary of your max weight limit... then purify this water at a campfire before drinking it.
Stress: encountering new kinds of enemies and experiencing certain events or trauma will spike your stress... keep your eyes peeled for herbs you can pick from the ground (they have a bright tip to their stem so they're pretty easy to spot). 1 of these herbs can be made into a join you can smoke for +15% stress/sanity. Yes, smoke joints and calm TF down lol
Health: bro don't worry about it - you'll find healing items, but if you take care of your other categories, you'll slowly regenerate life automatically. If you have a status ailment or injury, just click on that (you'll see them to the right on your character screen) to get an explanation of what you can do to fix the problem.
Melee Combat is awesome!
You've got 3 basic actions you can apparently perform with any melee weapon (this game is heavy on melee, btw):
Strike: obviously used to damage target, but can be blocked
Block: used to block an attack - works great so long as you and attacker are on relatively level terrain
Kick: used to break opponent guard or stagger
This kind of scissor/paper/rock combat is simple, yet highly engaging.
There are jump scares, occasionally
If you can't handle jump scares, maybe this game isn't for you. I've seen them happen in other games before and have almost always not been surprised. But this game is open-world and I truly did not expect the last couple I ran into... definitely was a bit of a shock and tbh I loved each of them.
Survival/Souls-Like Death Mechanics
I wasn't expecting this due to the heavy amount of narrative, but dying will cause your pack to drop, along with all of your items. I also seem to lose some percentage of scrap on death (scrap is money) which was not recoverable (keep me honest in comments, please - I could be wrong about the money loss).
The game tells me that I have 10 minutes to pickup my pack or it'll disappear. However, I was always able to get to my pack with a massive amount of time to spare and I had a skull icon on the compass to guide me to my pack.
When you consider that this is meant to be a multiplayer game, this experience does make sense to me.
Possible Bug?
I noticed that all loot boxes/crates/bags/etc had their loot respawn when I died.
This could definitely be exploited for player benefit, but I mention this because I actually stored a ton of stuff in a crate at the lighthouse (since I knew I would be returning) and I died on the way back. All the stuff in my crate was reset.
As mentioned before, a personal loot chest will become available later on in your personal home. Knowing this in advance would've saved me some frustration :)
Performance
So... the game performs great for me, actually... with some very rare but manageable slowdown of frames - and by this, I mean less than 60 FPS... I don't believe the game has ever dropped below 30 FPS for me.
Running on Maxed out Settings
4K Resolution
RTX 2080-Ti, 64GB RAM, Intel Core i5 10600K @ 4.10 Ghz. A bit dated, but plays this game very, very well
Would you believe I have to crank down to High or Medium to play 7 Days to Die at 60 FPS? Well... now you know :'(
Steam User 60
This game doesn't deserve it's mixed rating, it's not exceptional but its good fun with some friends especially on sale. It reminds me of about 50 different games at the same time, but the best way I can summarize it is:
Setting/environment: Metro/Stalker
Combat: We Happy Few
Aesthetic: Dishonored
Survival/looting: The Long Dark
Play on easy.
Steam User 19
I'm a little disappointed. It could have been a good game but instead it is mediocre. the graphics are acceptable but the monsters and their movements are unwatchable. At the beginning of the game everything is unbalanced. It is very uncomfortable to take objects with E and then press F without the game being automatically paused. So many game mechanics that don't go and small tricks were enough to make everything more fluid. It all becomes more acceptable over the course of the game, but that's not how it should be. 6/10 if it has a steep discount.
Steam User 9
well tldr is get in on sale for like 75% off and have fun devs gave up on this game if they would fix the bugs would be great and well worth 25
pros
nice locations
fair crafting
good story design
cons
lots of combats bugs
--guns dissapper when aiming down the sights
--animals dont react when hit no sound nothing
-- etc
Steam User 21
VOICE ACTING
MAY make or break your game dev's, this was a point in desolate that for me DEV's you dropped the ball,
-visuals are ok (not bad really)
-gameplay, it's ok,
-discovery, it's ok,
-weapons of choice (not bad).........
UHH the sounds of the voice acting...if more effort were added here it may have made the difference
between a decent game & THIS.
i'M not one for criticizing unnecessarily unless I think it may HELP the person to whom I am saying it.
In other words if this game were to receive a remaster or overhaul,
if you fixed the voice acting this would improve greatly your impression,
in my minds eye, I'm seeing dev's in a studio; it's now time to apply your sounds & audio,
let's CHOOSE that=NOOOOOO
hit your enemy AI, ('oomph' ain't right, there is just much better sounding games)
everything, other is ok,
+THERE is a map,
+there is a crafting bench,
+fast travel & interesting story,
+variety of beasts,
+the enemy AI (look ok),
+there is stealth options
+sometimes you think bioshock is looking back at you...but bioshock has much better voice acting
so-reluctantly,
& for sake of the game to survive I do recommend,
though my quarrel is & REMAINS the voice acting
Steam User 12
This is going to be weird because while playing through the game, I have noted sooooo much gripes in my mind, but somehow it still hooked me to go through the entire thing and 100% it (a bit of forcing myself for a few absurd grindy achievements though). Maybe it is the vibe and settings, or the gameplay scratching that Fallout itch for me, or perhaps I simply enjoy running around loot-hoarding trashes... I would still give this game YES as I shouldn't expect this to be a AAA quality game, but here goes and bear with my long list of cons below...
- Many aspects of the game feels mediocre / underdeveloped, it stink heavily with that "unpolished" vibe. I definitely like the whole survivor / horror settings, the potentials are there but executions and details are really not the best. Most of the game mechanics are poorly explained, you either look for guide or trial and errors through to "experience" and learn them on the go.
- The graphic actually looks pretty fine, but animation and interactions are janky and odd at times, one example is when you melee hit the Dorg, there is 0 feedback whether you actually hit or missed it (I don't even know if they have a dodge chance or I actually did not get close enough or what), like when you actually hit the Dorg there are no animation feedback and I have to rely on paying attention to the health bar to figure out... The human enemies are fine though as they would stagger if you hit them. The reaction of the player character when you get hit / dragged by monster also feels oddly unnatural. You also wouldn't know how you get hit, or from which direction at all as there are no indication.
- All NPCs that are not related to story or quest have no legit reaction at all too, the first time I stumbled upon a merchant in the Theater area I was like wow there is friendly NPC survivor here in this horror-filled island, let's see what's the deal with him... And bam this random dude who setup store alone in the middle of nowhere actually have nothing to say when he see a stranger barge into his house, he just initiate trade if you speak to him... At that moment I just think to myself, might as well just design these as a vending machine so things don't feel so weird..?
- One of my biggest gripe is definitely the absurd amount of stupid jump scares in the game... The devs love to put those random paranormal events all over the map that always reoccur even though you've already seen it multiple times. Normally I find these events acceptable (it's a horror game after all) BUT in this game the volume of everything else are pretty low (certain conversation also get even lower with no reason at all) but they seem to purposely make those sudden jump scare sound effect EXTRA LOUD just to shock you. And to make thing absolute worse, many times the loud sound effect play (I already jumped) but there is NOTHING in my view lol.. It is like the triggering boundary of some events are wrongly placed, if you get what I mean. That ghost girl thing is also super vibe-killing at times because it can randomly appear at certain location EVEN when you are in combat with another enemy or when they are other NPC locals walking beside you... It just totally break the immersion.
- I am not sure could I explain it properly, but the story and some side quests just kinda fail to relate / immerse me emotionally... Example one of the side quest where you are tasked to go after a maniac killer, the main character suddenly burst in anger when he found some corpses, but dude this main char himself killed so many more people along the way and he is suddenly upset with 1-2 dead people that have 0 relation to him? I just can't.... The ending also feels pretty meh to me... Kinda like it was a rushed closure.
- Personally I also don't understand why this game is designed to be multiplayer (I played solo on hard), it probably would break the immersion even more, plus the whole story and settings make more sense and feels more suitable if it's for a lone volunteer? If only they actually make it single-player and focus on polishing it, it could've been a much better game...
In a nutshell I guess I can fully understand why the overall mixed reviews here... But looking past all the above I've listed (plus some bugs here and there), it is still an enjoyable open world survivor game, with alright core gameplay and it comes with a fairly large map to explore and lengthy story.
Steam User 9
Positive surprise. Got it from a bundle with no positive expectations at all after reading about it on the Store page. 'Form a team of 4 or do it on your own' says the store page. So some sort of garbage horror that steam is full of along with a forced multiplayer component. Yawn...So lets check this janky indie Dead island with extra darkness eh?
In reality this could not be further from that. Game could be a sister game to S.T.A.L.K.E.R series for all i know. It even has anomalies that behave in a familiar way and a nice eastern vibe so at least it has some inspiration taken from it. I keep racking up hours in this and it just has that something that keeps me playing it. Perhaps it's that survival element as you only really have melee weapons (ammo is rare) and sneaking is important as you can't fight them all. Horror elements are working well. Those jump scares work better in a open world environment and some have been really nasty surprises as they spring forth when you have not been ready for it at all.
I am not sure how far i will get with the game as there is some jankyness to how things work and i would not be surprised if story scripting would get broken at some point but with these hours i am having a blast and that is a big surprise to me. I am not even that mad about the darkness in this game. Usually games that want to force the player to stumble around in darkness do it just for the giggles and players respond by yanking up the brightness to max to make it playable but in this game the darkness has a bit bigger role than usual. It is straight up scary to cross a forest when you can literally stumble on enemies in the forest so picking your path and deciding when to fight and when to run away / sneak are core elements in the experience.