As mentioned in Surviving Survival Part 2, the next thing on my weekly gaming group’s hit-list was Icarus. Icarus is a game I was entirely oblivious to until one of the group recommended we check it out next, as he’d previously played it a bit and enjoyed it. Released in 2021 by Dean Hall of DayZ fame and his studio RocketWerkz, I’m kind of surprised I hadn’t at least heard of it. Looking for more info, I stumbled across a random entertaining video showing a group of friends and their hijinks in the game. It looked interesting, if not perhaps just a little hardcore for our group, as the game is close to a pure “tree-puncher” style open world survival crafting game, and our enjoyment of it was very likely to hinge on how well that difficulty was tuned.
“Hunting on a rainy day on Icarus.”
The premise is simple enough. An attempt to terraform a planet (the titular “Icarus”) goes wrong due to the presence of undetected exotic matter, and while the result is not habitable to humans, life evidently found a way. You and your team of disposable prospectors head down to the planet’s surface to collect various samples, run tests, and of course, gather some of these valuable “exotics”, all of which will also require you to become self-sufficient enough to survive the harsh climate for the duration. While the latter aspect is pretty cookie cutter, the former is represented by a series of missions that you can choose on-demand. There are a number of these, many of which are of the “go to this place and do this thing” variety. Usually gather or scan special items, resources or kill/destroy a creature or structure, for example. Completing these will reward you with some of the game’s in-game currencies, which then allow you to purchase supplies that can either be sent down to you, or work as upgrades to your starting gear for future expeditions, rogue-lite style. Those systems are actually pretty neat, and I did appreciate having a bit more structure rather than the experience being totally unguided, though I feel like they could definitely be expanded on quite a bit more. It’s also amusing to think that the United Development Agency sends you down with such meager supplies that your survival journey starts out with you living like a literal caveman, yet are quite capable of offering you a leg up in exchange for some valuable materials. Too realistic!
As mentioned, the teching up (which is done via talent points, earned from performing numerous in-game actions) starts out with you building tools, weapons, and structures out of bone, wood, and stone, but jumps to more and more modern material and equipment as you move between its 4 tiers. Since you’re completely alone on a primitive planet, you pretty much have to craft everything too. It’s fine, and there are even some really neat touches here and there, but man, does it get repetitive damn quickly. But honestly, so does everything else. While the world itself is handcrafted, there is very little of interest here. Yes, it’s fun exploring, finding new caves to clear out, wildlife to hunt or tame, and resources to gather, and some of the missions are quite fun too, but it wears out its welcome fast and begins to feel like a bit of a grind. The relatively nice graphics, which I think look really good at times, can’t really save that from eventually being an issue. I’m not trying to pick on Icarus here, as I think that is a challenge the genre as a whole struggles with, and that balance doesn’t seem like an easy one to strike.
“Trapped in a tree-stand by a pack of wolves. Fun!”
This, not any perception of difficulty, was the reason why, after 40-some hours, we decided to move on to something new. That said, I really do think if you’re someone who likes a reasonably “pure” survival crafting experience, Icarus should be on your short list of games to check out – you may absolutely love it. It’s a solid game with some unique features, and hey, it’s still getting regular updates with new features and other additions to this day. I could even see enjoying a long solo play-through, if you really like the genre. As for us, it’s definitely possible we’ll come back in the future, though maybe prospecting on a brand new world (which are sold separately as the game’s main DLC strategy.)
I’ll close out Icarus with a little anecdote, a hilarious emergent moment that was so awesome I found myself telling friends at work about it the following day, and was probably a big part of why I was happy to stick it out for so many more hours:
“The last moments of our beloved fishing pier…”
As part of our very first session, we built our little settlement on the banks of a small lake close to where we initially landed. If you’ve played Icarus, you probably know the one. As the member of our crew who had played before knew he’d want to spend a good chunk of his time fishing, he decided to build a fishing pier to make this a bit easier. At first this started off as a tiny dock, but eventually expanded into a massive pier that reached the middle of the lake, complete with railings and a covered roof, and later an extension to another part of the lake so it could serve as more of a bridge. It was wholly unnecessary, but these kinds of distracting projects can be a key part of the fun of the genre in my opinion. One thing I didn’t mention about Icarus is its dynamic weather system, which can require you to seek shelter from various dangers, depending on the biome you’re in. Right at the end of our session, after our rather impressive pier was totally up and operational, a severe lightning storm rolled in right on top of us. The sustained barrage of lightning strikes ended up catching our pier on fire, and several of us braved the conditions to run out and try to save it, or at the very least, keep the fire from possibly spreading to the rest of our camp. Given that our tech was still effectively tier 1, the best we could do was run into the chaos and try to beat the fire back with primitive “fire whacker” tools. As ineffective as this sounds, it worked okay at first, and we were able to keep the fire from spreading inland, but as it spread, we found ourselves in danger of being cut off and had to retreat. Unfortunately I was stuck in the middle of the pier, surrounded by raging flames, and soon discovered that the railings we’d added for decorative purposes had turned into my prison bars, keeping me from being able to jump off into the safety of the water. In an intense panic, the idea of simply deconstructing them didn’t occur to me, and I finally destroyed one of the floor panels and just barely managed dive into the lake and make it back to shore.
Our session ended with us all standing there watching helplessly as the fire engulfed the entire structure, eventually leaving nothing standing except for some of the timber piles that were below the water line. In terms of our progress, it was a bit of a gut punch, sure, but in the moment? One of the most incredible introductions to a game I can remember experiencing!
“Taking a breather in an abandoned house.”
Project Zomboid has been brought up frequently in our little gaming group, as it’s one of one member’s all time favorite games. He finally somehow talked everyone into giving it a whirl, so we jumped into a new server he spun up, complete with an impressively massive array of mods to expand numerous systems and add a multitude of new items. If he hadn’t spent so much time curating and optimizing the mod list, I don’t think there would have been any chance we’d have jumped into the deep end like that, but alas, he made it pretty easy for us. It’s a good thing too, as learning the game itself was a big enough drain on our collective energies.
Let me rewind for a moment and talk more about what Project Zomboid actually is. It’s a (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) open world survival game, but as it’s set during a zombie apocalypse, it focuses a lot more on scavenging than progressing your way up through a more traditional gathering, crafting, and base building system. That’s not to say it doesn’t have a ridiculously deep crafting system – it does – but it’s a notable difference after just describing Icarus. It also has a pretty in-depth skill system, including a favorite feature of allowing you to take negative traits to get more points to allocate during character creation, which was greatly expanded by some of the aforementioned mods. On top of all of that, there is a surprising amount of simulation in the game – weird little systems that, while mostly unnecessary, go a long way to add detail to the world which, to me personally, make time spent in the inhospitable world of Project Zomboid so much more immersive. Very cool!
“Looting a warehouse.”
No, the biggest hurdle a lot of players will have with Project Zomboid is its relatively simplistic isometric graphics. I’m no stranger to getting immersed in an isometric world myself, but I fully expected the others to really struggle with it. Surprisingly, everyone seemed to adapt reasonably quickly. Instead, almost all of the difficulty came from the fact that, especially early on, you’re going to be using melee weapons a lot, and lining up your character with an enemy is quite a bit more fiddly than it really should be, leading to occasionally missing a swing you think you’re perfectly aligned with, for example. One missed hit can cause a fight to quickly spiral out of control, as the next thing you know your character has been bitten, and possibly infected as a result, and now instead of confidently managing the zombie threat around you, you’re suddenly being completely overrun, struggling in a chaotic fight for survival. While yes, when I put it that way that does sound like a cool scene from The Walking Dead or something, when you’re actually playing the game, it can feel incredibly frustrating. Dying when it doesn’t feel like it was your fault is never a fun time, though this became less of a problem the more I started to rely on firearms instead.
While I’m on the subject, the entire health system is quite brutal. Bites happen pretty randomly, even when well protected, and getting infected means you’ll be suffering a slow (well, sometimes quick) demise. This can feel like it comes out of nowhere, though after the first few times you drop dead seemingly randomly, you’ll probably learn to start checking your status a bit more frequently. Thankfully, one of the mods on our server let us loot “zombievoxir ampules” from a rare type of zombie, which could cure the infection instantly, and the hunt for those special zombies was sometimes a pretty enjoyable diversion. Regardless, I liked having some way to cure the infection, which from my understanding does not exist in the base game. The brutality doesn’t stop there though, there are numerous other ways to get hurt or die, and another way that is probably a bit more prominent than it should be, is from car crashes. The roads are littered with hazards and driving really fast is a recipe for disaster. While, unlike a lot of isometric games, you can zoom your view out quite far, there can still be an issue with the engine rendering everything quickly enough to avoid collisions. Getting ejected from a car sucks, naturally, but even minor fender benders can result in a lingering internal injury that you absolutely need to address.
“Clearing the road for our convoy… in style!”
My last major gripe relates to dying. On one hand, if your character dies, you can simply roll a new one and rejoin the server. Then, with some luck, you can track down your body and at least get your old gear back, though this might require killing the zombie version of your old character first. We also had a mod that awarded extra traits points during character creation depending on how long your previous character survived, which added some nice rogue-lite style progression, and since you were making a whole new character, let you more freely experiment with different builds as an added bonus. On the other hand, one way that skills are learned is via finding and reading books in the world. These don’t actually give you skills directly, but boost the XP multiplier you get while learning them. Unfortunately those bonuses are lost upon death, making the hunt for those books feel like a total waste of time, at least if you’re a newbie who finds the idea of living a long life more outlandish than the possibility of frequent deaths. There are, of course, mods to entirely fix that issue too, we just weren’t using one.
What Project Zomboid really succeeds at is the aforementioned sense of immersion. Somehow its highly interactive environments, numerous detailed functional systems, including some with a fair amount of depth, and the loop of scavenging in a world filled to the brim with useful junk (which I’ve mentioned before on the blog, triggers something in me) really does suck you in quite effectively after you’ve overcome the rest of the game’s idiosyncrasies. All these months later I still have vivid memories of driving our convoy of multiple vehicles around desolate city streets, panicking as a car gets stuck and the horde closes in around us, clearing out nearby towns to stock up on ammo at the local police station, raiding grocery stores for food, hunting down bandits, etc. It doesn’t hurt that the isometric view, ability to pick up and interact with almost everything, and the flexible skill based system reminds me of one of my favorite MMORPGs, Ultima Online.
“Chilling in the kitchen of our stronghold.”
In the end, after something like 50 hours played, we moved on simply because we kind of ran out of things to do. Like a lot of these types of games, once you overcome the basic survival mechanics and “figure out” a lot of the other gameplay systems, there’s not much to do except continuing to live in your virtual world. Sure, you can continue to improve skills and get better and better gear, and maybe build the ultimate stronghold, but to what end? PVP is the answer to that question in a lot of more online oriented games (Rust, Scum, DayZ, etc.) but without some stronger late game content to compel you to keep playing, the loop can start to feel repetitive and stale. That’s not to say everyone will feel this way, as the person on our crew who loves Project Zomboid so much? 850 hours played! 😂
We followed Project Zomboid up with a game I’d been wanting to play since its release in late 2023, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. Return to Moria had the misfortune of being another somewhat budget LoTR game, as one released earlier in the year that became a punching bag for every gaming related content creator out there, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. While I don’t think Return to Moria was unfairly bashed because of the association, at least not widely, between that and its already niche genre, I do think that it was largely ignored by a lot of people who would have potentially really enjoyed it, as Return to Moria lands on my short list of favorite survival games that I’ve played as part of this series.
“Proud of my very first tunnel…”
The basic premise of Return to Moria is that you’re one of Gimli’s company of dwarves seeking to reclaim the once great city of Khazad-dûm and its ancestral riches after the events of The Lord of the Rings and Sauron’s defeat. Yes boys, it’s time to start cranking out Mithril again! Unfortunately you (and if playing co-op, your companions) get stuck inside of Moria during the initial excavation, separated from the rest of the company. You’ll need to explore through the sprawling, ancient structure, which might have been creepy enough if it were simply abandoned, but of course, it’s filled with spiders, orcs, bats, and everything else you might suspect if you’d read the books or seen the movies. On top of that, this is a survival crafting game! You’ll need to build structures and workbenches to make better equipment, repair them after use, cook and brew buff-granting food and drink, etc.
“Fighting Goblin Men in the beautiful Elven Quarter.”
Right off of the bat, Return to Moria has a level of visual presentation and polish that is uncommon in these kinds of games. While its stylized graphics might not be to everyone’s tastes, it looks great overall. It sounds good too, even bringing John Rhys-Davies back from the movies to voice Gimli, even if that is a bit more like a cameo than any sort of lead role. Early reviewers often pointed out how your own character spoke here and there, and you can even select an all-dwarven dialect voice when creating your character. There’s a lot of nice little touches too, like your dwarves (optionally) singing when mining, which they can do together when playing with others – that never stopped being enjoyable!
Probably the main reason the game was such a success for us was that, not unlike something like Grounded or Abiotic Factor, while it was more or less an open world (with a little gating here and there to control jumps in difficulty) it has a guided, linear path through the story. In this case, as you can probably guess by the story setup I mentioned above, it guides you through various parts of Moria and eventually, with any luck, out of it. One downside is that, like Abiotic Factor, since it is guiding you all around, you might be naturally inclined to take a somewhat nomadic approach to base building, though also not unlike in Abiotic Factor, we built our final base in a place that was reasonably walkable to most mid-game areas, and by the late game we’d unlocked the ability to teleport between “Mapstones” which are static teleportation targets scattered around a small selection of notable places. Absolutely canon-destroying, but fast travel can be invaluable in these types of games. I’m glad we did, as the game also has base invasion events which, while not as intense as a game like 7 Days to Die, does at least give you a reason to fortify your base and think about your design a bit more.
“It’s a long way down, and we need to climb it…”
Wandering through Moria, which ranges from dreary indoor corridors to massive underground cities, epic chasms, and wide open areas that almost feel like being outdoors, mining for ore and gathering materials, and slaying quite a lot of orcs along the way is pretty damn fun. Combat feels something like a very simplistic take on the now ubiquitous Dark Souls style combat – lots of blocking and rolling, but not much else. It’s a little tricky at first but you’ll likely get comfortable with it quite quickly. To be clear, it is definitely a bit more exploration and combat heavy than a lot of these kinds of games. It probably reminds me most of Enshrouded in that respect, but that’s definitely not a bad thing. Naturally, there’s a lot of verticality in exploring, and as implied, there’s quite a lot of variety here too. Also, I really love the very Norse inspired designs of the weapons and armor here. Oh, and while randomly dolling out compliments, and the lightning system is quite cool too.
There are some negatives, naturally. Some of the enemy designs definitely look a little off, though thankfully that’s not really an issue with the ones you’ll be running into most often, nor your dwarves. The in-game map UI? I fucking hate it. It chops up every major area (or zone) into a small block, and completely fails to give a clear idea of the scale nor any sort of detail, but only a vague idea of how these areas are connected. It looks more like something the designers would have used to show high level zone connectivity and flow than something useful to us players. These map issues compound another problem, which is that your next steps and/or how to achieve them aren’t always obvious. There were at least a couple of steps in the campaign which had us confused and discussing where to go and what to do next. While you could argue that figuring this out ourselves is part of the challenge, it didn’t feel like an intentional design decision, but rather a UX issue.
“Frequent drinking breaks are mandatory!”
Another thing that I found annoying were the buffs. There are numerous ways to get your characters temporary buffs, most of which stack, so while it’s advisable to fully apply these effects to yourself before heading out on an expedition, I swear these things feel like they wear off a minute after you walk out of your front door. This issue is even more pronounced when using fast travel, which makes the whole system feel almost pointless. Seriously, why have these reasonable developed systems for us to invest in if they’re not actually useful? This feels like an odd balancing issue that would have been fixed ages ago if this were more of an MMO or live service game.
A much smaller gripe is that I wish there was more of, well, everything in the game – weapons, armor, utility items, enemies, etc. There are plenty, don’t get me wrong, but, especially when it comes to tiered weapons and armor, I’d love even more variety here, particularly when it comes to “masterwork” items which are legendary items that you’re only able to ever carry one of, and even have their own special slot. There are very few of these – some utility items, a couple of weapons, and a shield – but these are also tiered, and sometimes it’s hard to choose between them. I mean, would I rather have a permanent light source attached to my backpack, an amazing pick axe, or an awesome weapon? All three, please! You can take this one as more of a compliment though – I want more because I like what is there so much!
“Well, it worked in The Hobbit!”
I can only nitpick about this game so much though. I loved it, and I think my group did as well, despite some confusing and/or challenging parts. I mean, we saw it through to the end, which is rare enough for this series, right? Like with Project Zomboid, I have some vivid memories of my time with Return to Moria, from challenging boss fights against an Orc Warchief that we were probably not quite ready to face, our first run in with a Troll, climbing down the Crystal Descent for the first time, and later, being confident enough to explore the Darkest Deep as a group all immediately come to mind. Unfortunately the linear structure of it means it’s unlikely that we’ll ever go back to it now that we’ve beaten it, though I could see myself returning to it solo in the future, or jumping in with a different group, certainly, especially since they’re apparently not done putting out content for it. Excellent game!
Apologies for the lack of good Icarus and Project Zomboid screenshots. I promise they’re more exciting than I made them look. With PZ in particular, I assume I was far too busy trying to not to get ripped apart limb from limb by the zombie hordes to get any good screenshots.
