I think I’ve started multiple news articles during my career at PCG with some variant of ‘I’m not really a survival game guy.’ Does that mean I’m not going to start this one the same way? No, it just means I’ve gotten really good at it.
I’m not really a survival game guy, and there are multiple reasons for that. First and foremost: I find it difficult enough to survive in real life without the stress of keeping some kind of digital homunculus going too. But also, I find them all a bit samey. You start out on an island, probably nude, and have to punch trees and rocks until the dialectic of quantity and quality tips over and lets you do the industrial revolution. This takes approximately 400 hours.
Sergei Bezborodko, solo dev behind The Last Plague: Blight, agrees with me. “I feel like a lot of the survival games coming out these days follow a fairly specific formula that has shown to have success time and time again,” he says. “Things like crafting, inventory management, base building, hunger and/or thirst management, etc, seem fairly similar in a lot of games.”
Bezborodko is trying to avoid that in The Last Plague “I tried to be very conscious of these commonly seen elements in the genre and avoid them in my game,” he says. “For the elements I can’t avoid, I’ve tried to at least change them up to be a bit different.” That means no “simplistic” crafting, no “generic” resources, and no zombies. It also means, for better or worse, crafting that’s as laborious as it is in real life. “For example, being able to make bronze blades or objects requires you to make a mold first and then pour molten bronze into the molds to make the desired item, rather than just clicking something to convert bronze ore into an axe.”
Which is the kind of thing that either has you slavering like a sicko or running for the hills, depending on inclination. For me, I confess that adding more steps to the process of crafting isn’t the kind of thing that appeals, but there were elements of The Last Plague’s demo that grabbed me when I played it. Bezborodko says he’s “inspired by non-survival games like Fallout with elements like the radiation in those games,” which is where the titular, spreading Blight comes from.
Factoring that into my thinking about the where and how of building my base made the choice more interesting than in other survival games, where I’m generally just trying to put myself as close as possible to necessary resources to cut down tedium. Likewise, playing from an overhead perspective made me feel a bit more like I was playing a CRPG than your traditional, first-person survival thing. I don’t think The Last Plague is gonna persuade me to enjoy the process of gathering resources where other games didn’t, but I had more fun with it than most.
If you want to check out the demo yourself, it’s available over on Steam.