Previews
[Early Access Impressions] Classic ‘Fallout’ Meets Flesh n’ Puke Gross Out in Indie RPG ‘Death Trash’
When Fallout 3 was announced, I was one of the many people who were hesitant about the change in perspective for the series. There was something about the look and feel of those old isometric games that captured the grimy, icky apocalypse they were going for that wasn’t quite as appealing when rendered in crisper graphics that you could explore in first person. While I have grown to enjoy the later Fallout games, I’m always hoping something out there can recapture the feeling of the originals. Enter Death Trash.
Much like Fallout, Death Trash begins with a brief tutorial before exiling you from an underground bunker and letting you loose in a flesh-covered wasteland. Skinless mutants wander alongside your standard complement of raiders and weirdos, and all the “normal” people you find feed on the strange meat that mysteriously grows from the earth. It’s a decidedly gross world, where you’re likely to run into a wayward nudist or a place called “Puke Bar,” but the pixelated art style keeps it from being disgustingly off putting.
Death Trash ostensibly lets you build your character’s stats to fit your playstyle, allowing you to put points in skills like animalism, cybertech and occultism. These options seem to be padded out by an unnecessary granularity in the combat stats (such as blunt vs bladed melee weapons), and the social stats seem underutilized at the moment. This seems to stem from an unfortunate case of trying to mimic the minutiae of Fallout without consideration if the game needs it or not. Since combat is so skill-based, the effect of the combat stats isn’t quite as immediately evident, aside from preventing you from using certain weapons. It’s not quite as robust as it appears to be at first glance, but the game is in Early Access, so that part of the game could be developed further as the project progresses.
The real-time combat is fast and desperate, giving you options to fight either with melee or ranged weapons. Timing is everything as you try to dance around your enemy’s reload window and sneak in your strikes before you have to dodge roll away from theirs. Ammo is scarce, especially before you can purchase the crafting recipes for bullets and shells, so you’ll find yourself leaning more on swords and clubs instead of shotguns and rifles. A basic stealth system helps you start off encounters on the right foot, but you’ll still need good reflexes and smart resource management to make it through fights. It’s a fun bit of mental math you have to do when confronted with an encounter; is this group worth using some of my limited bullets on, or should I try to carefully pick them off with my sword? Cyberware can also give you skills to help out in encounters, but those too are limited in their usage.
Dungeons in Death Trash can be pretty challenging, especially in the early stages before you’ve found or purchased better equipment. These dungeons feel a lot like the Fallout formula, running you through mazes that are peppered with lore notes to find between enemy encounters. Liberal use of quicksave keeps it from being too frustrating, but expect to die a lot in the early going when fighting bigger groups of marauders.
For a game that’s trying to be aggressively unpleasant, the world draws you in with intriguing and bizarre details that give Death Trash its own unique identity, even when compared to its influences. One of the skills you start off with is “puke,” which you can, oddly enough, use to reactivate cyborgs and machines on a couple occasions. The strange flesh throughout the landscape not only gives a good visual flair, but creates an interesting mystery. No one knows where it comes from, but everyone seems super comfortable eating it (it’s even used as your primary method of healing yourself). As you progress, you learn that you have the ability to communicate with the meat and the network of beings connected to it. Proper nouns like “Worm Shaman” and “Flesh Nexus” drew me into its mythology and left me wanting more.
In addition to investigating that overall mystery, you’re also given extra sidequests that let you learn more about the characters that inhabit the various towns and locations throughout the world. Most of them so far have been pretty easy fetch quests, but they give you good reasons to move around the map and fully investigate the areas. As you are travelling the overworld map, you can run into random encounters, but those are generally just simple combat encounters or quick character interactions. They make the world feel a bit more alive and dynamic, though ultimately don’t add too much.
While there’s a lot to love about Death Trash right now, it’s definitely a game that’s early in its Early Access run. After only about three or four hours of playing, I already ran into a message saying “WIP Quest – Come Back Later.” The core loop of exploring and combat is satisfying, and the world is already, excuse the pun, fleshed out, but the lack of content may be a reason to hold off on purchasing. For me, I was glad to jump into Early Access to help this small project out, but I might put it down until the full release so I can experience it in its full glory when it’s ready.
Death Trash is out now in Early Access on PC.
Previews
‘Evil Dead: The Game’ Looks to Be Raising the Bar for Asymmetrical Horror [Hands-On Preview]
The idea of synthesizing all of the moving pieces of the Evil Dead series into one cohesive package is one vicious, behemoth Deadite in itself. But on top of that, transcending the medium of film and television and adapting it into a gaming genre as volatile as asymmetrical multiplayer? One would naturally question how Saber Interactive could possibly appease every possible audience with EVIL DEAD: THE GAME, from veteran film fans to savvy gamers who want a unique and engaging experience. But as someone who fits into both camps who recently spent an hour with the developers kicking Deadite ass (and kicking ass as Deadites), I can happily report that Saber Interactive has pulled it off. EVIL DEAD: THE GAME is asymmetrical multiplayer at its best.
For those unfamiliar, asymmetrical multiplayer is a gameplay paradigm that heavily skews the power dynamic between two opposing teams. In the case of EVIL DEAD: THE GAME, four players select a character from the roster of Ash Williams and his cohorts from across the Evil Dead franchise (the “Survivor” team) to face one player who controls the all-powerful Kandarian Demon (the “Killer” team).
The survivor team is packed with familiar faces, including multiple iterations of Ash Williams as he appears throughout the Evil Dead series, meaning if you want to play Avengers multiverse style as a team of four different Ashes, the choice is yours. Just expect to hear a lot of quips from Bruce Campbell, who returned to reprise his role along with almost all of the original cast members from the films and television series. If you’re feeling a bit more sadistic, you can opt to play as The Kandarian Demon, which gives you the ability to control and summon Deadites to hinder and destroy the survivor team before they have a chance to use the Necronomicon to open a portal and excise the evil.
One important question I had when going into the preview was “How is this game going to stand out from its peers in the asymmetrical multiplayer space?” The genre is already well-known for hits like Behaviour Interactive’s Dead By Daylight, and is becoming further saturated with upcoming titles like Gun Media’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre game. Walking out of the preview, I felt that Saber Interactive knocked it out of the park in multiple ways, but my biggest takeaway was the sense of agency that the gameplay provides on both the survivor and killer sides.
For starters, on the survivor side, you’re given the option to select a character that fits into one of four categories: Leader, Warrior, Hunter, or Support. Each character in their respective class holds certain abilities that fit their archetype–for example, Cheryl in Support has an ability that heals the team as they converge around her. This system immediately establishes an element of complexity to the gameplay: how do you build synergy based on these classes? Do you want to be in the fray battling it out, or would you rather scout out objectives and rally the team to success? Additionally, you have the option of upgrading your abilities via cans of Pink-F scattered throughout the map, and have access to an expansive list of weapons to choose from shotguns to Medieval swords.
On the other hand, as the Kandarian Demon, you’re given free rein to zip across the map and collect Infernal Energy, which is used for all sorts of offensive options from summoning Deadites, to conjuring up traps, and my favorite, possession. Think of it like the survivors are in one big haunted house, and you’re the one with the master switch that controls everything that happens, from jump-scare traps to possessed trees and cars. Survivors themselves can even become possessed once their fear meters max out, giving you the option to take control of their characters to lay the smackdown on their team members, waste all of their ammo or separate them from the group. It’s as chaotic as it is a genuinely unique and a fresh take on the genre that’s never been seen before.
These factors of complexity and agency are so important because it counteracts an issue that often presents itself in asymmetrical horror: redundancy. Continuously playing matches can grow stagnant quickly if the gameplay isn’t complex and the same objectives need to be completed over and over again. The one hour I played of EVIL DEAD: THE GAME left me hungry to explore more. How does the gameplay differ between survivors? What are the other weapons like? How can I best optimize my team? And more importantly, I was excited to try out playing as the killer again. Like many other folks who play asymmetrical multiplayer, I tend to favor playing as the survivor over the killer, but playing as the Kandarian Demon was such a blast that I could see myself defecting to the dark side with EVIL DEAD.
EVIL DEAD: THE GAME truly offers something for everyone. Those who have stuck with the franchise since Sam Raimi’s first film in 1981 will love the homages and faithful adaptations, and those new to the series will love the blend of action, horror, and humor. People familiar with asymmetrical multiplayer can expect a fresh and innovative take on the genre, and if you’re new to asymmetrical multiplayer? I can confidently say EVIL DEAD: THE GAME will set the bar high for you.
EVIL DEAD: THE GAME will release on PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Series X/S, and PC via the Epic Games Store on May 13th, 2022.
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