Nuts To This!

A couple of days ago, I mentioned I was downloading the demo for an open-world survival game called Squirreled Away. I said I might write a post about it, after I'd played it. Well, now I have and now I am.

Not that I have an awful lot to say about the demo or the game. It's pretty much what I expected from a light-hearted survival title, where you play as a squirrel. All the usual survival mechanics are in place and they feel there or thereabouts as compulsive as they always do. 

The reverse is also true. I very much doubt, if you've found it easy to resist the attractions of the genre until now, this is going to be the game that changes your mind. I wouldn't say the demo feels by the numbers but equally it's not out to shake up anyone's expectations. It's a good introduction to a game that looks like it was primarily designed to give the punters what they want.

I certainly enjoyed my seventy-six minutes, split across two sessions. If I was looking for a new survival game I might well have followed through and bought it, not least because it looks to be good value. The full game is only $14.99 (£12.99 for me.), which sounds like a very fair price. As it is, I'm not in the market for a new survival game just now and if I was I'd be more likely go for Dragonwilds even at twice the price but as a demo, this one does the job.

And the demo, which obviously is free, makes for a fun little diversion in its own right. If you wanted to get into the building elements, you might squeeze a few hours out of it. 

Mostly, though, it's the tutorial island, where you learn the basics by way of half a dozen quests, given to you by your fellow squirrels, all of whom have weirdly human names. They also all have problems only you, a complete stranger, can solve. Isn't that always the way?

The best thing about the game from my perspective was the movement, which felt fluid, intuitive and entertaining in and of itself. Your squirrel (Now I come to think about it, I'm not sure he/she/they even has a name...) bounds around in convincingly squirrely fashion, running up trees as though gravity doesn't exist. 

Actually, gravity barely does exist. There's no falling damage and you can't fall off a tree unless you press Ctrl first.

You can also swim, although it requires endurance that runs out very quickly, preventing you from swimming across the lake from the all-animal island to the enticing shoreline opposite, where the humans live. You can't even swim to the next island but fortunately there's a friendly turtle with nothing better to do than ferry curious squirrels from one island to the other and back again.

At least, he's willing once you've proved your community credentials by helping all those aforementioned squirrels with their fallen-down houses and such. "No freeloaders", that's Terry the Turtle's motto. (It's not, by the way.I just made it up. He's much friendlier than that.)

One of the squirrels, Maya, teaches you how to meditate. It would have to be Maya, wouldn't it? Not Claire, Mike or Sam. Meditation is how you learn crafting recipes, which might seem odd but you can't really argue with it. How do you imagine a squirrel would learn to make an axe out of a stick, a pebble and some resin they found up a tree? Meditation seems like as good an explanation as any.

My first session, I played for fifty minutes, doing exactly what you'd expect. I scampered around, picking up sticks and pebbles. I climbed trees to get resin. I collected strawberries and nuts to snack on because Squirreled Away is a survival game and you do have to eat. Although not, as far as I can see, drink or sleep, at least not in the demo.

When I had enough, I made my axe and my pickax and ran around chopping up bigger twigs for more sticks and breaking up bigger rocks for more pebbles. I learned how to find and fill a cache, which is where the squirrels keep their nuts, among other things. 

I helped all my new squirrel pals and ticked off all my quests so Terry the Turtle would ferry me to the next island and then when he was ready to take me, I wasn't quite ready to go. I still had a Golden Acorn to find. As well as leading the guided meditations, Maya also minds the mystic circle of pillars where, if you can find and place all five Golden Acorns, a ghostly blue squirrel appears and gives you a permanent buff that gives you more stamina.

I didn't want to miss out on that so I carried on looking. I had four but the fifth eluded me, even though the pillars themselves give some hefty hints. In the end I found the missing acorn at the bottom of a hollow log. Then I hopped onto Terry's shell and off we went.

I had some minor issues with the UI, particularly when it came to building, which felt fiddlier than it does in many games, but there's one very useful function I really liked. If you hold down RMB, the screen fades and the names of every creature in a very wide area appears, along with a headshot that lets you know what species they are and a distance, measured in Paws, that tells you how near or far they are.

I found it very handy but when I jumped off Terry's back onto the sand and turned it on to see what was waiting for me, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. The second island was clearly going to be a lot busier than the first.

It was getting late, so I decided to leave exploring the new place for another day. It looked like the demo was going to be one of those really lengthy ones you can play for several hours without repeating yourself.

It wasn't, not really. Most of the second island turned out to be cordoned off by an impenetrable grid. I could see all the new squirrels waving at me, no doubt desperate for me to come and help them with stuff they ought to have been able to do for themselves, but I couldn't get to any of them.

As far as I can tell, there's only one reason the demo lets you go to the second island at all and that's so you can try out the housing. Okay, I guess it also whets your appetite for what you could be doing if you bought the full game - all those juicy exclamation marks with their as-yet unknown quests - but you're obviously really there to give housing a go.

And the housing offer looks pretty solid. An embarrassingly-named seagull called Lotta Land fills you in on the details although it's all very straightforward. I was able to knock up a nice little shack with a roof and a balcony and somewhere to place my bed in about a quarter of an hour this morning. Construction required nothing but sticks, which made it pleasantly simple to get started. I assume there's more complexity later.

I admit I'm a little curious to see for myself. As I've said before, these days I find the early stages of survival games at least as addictive as I once found classic MMORPG starting areas. Both are pleasures in themselves, regardless of whether you  go on to play the games seriously, which means the fun never seems to wear thin. I spent the best part of two decades very contentedly replaying what was effectively the same content in scores of different MMORPGs, not to mention multiple runs in the same ones, and now it seems likely I'll do the same in dozens of open-world survival games.

Whether I'll want to do it as squirrel is another question. Even though I generally enjoy playing anthropomorphic animals even more than I like playing humanoids, this particular quadruped didn't immediately catch my fancy. It felt a bit characterless, hardly surprising given there's no character creation. You're just a squirrel and that's that.

If you've ever fantasized about becoming a tool-using squirrel, though, this is your game.