In Flotsam, the player must help a group of people who survived a catastrophe build a new home for themselves. To do this, you need to manage a floating city and collect resources along the way - this is a long process that will appeal to fans of measured gameplay.
The game starts with technical problems. It's hard to understand exactly what is being rendered in the initial stages, but this "something" puts a lot of strain on the CPU and GPU - the system unit heated up an order of magnitude more than when playing Of Ash and Steel, which has memory leak problems. After a few hours, the game returns to normal, and problems arise only in the form of minor bugs.
Perhaps serious power is needed to generate a huge body of water, with a large number of animated objects. According to the plot, the world has survived a great flood, and now survivors can observe the flooded remains of civilizations, among which fish and whales swim. On the surface, there is floating debris and islands that were previously elevations.
A group of people called drifters managed to settle on an ark that plows the water surface of the new world. To survive, they need food and water, which they still have to get. For a happy life, they need decorations that provide a good mood.
To maintain the floating base in working order, tons of resources will be needed. At first, you will have to be content with the garbage that has surfaced, which is wood and plastic. If you're lucky, you'll come across a source of food in the form of algae. As soon as the drifters sort out the contents of the islets, it's time to open the global map and head to the next ones.
The collected resources are needed to build production buildings around the base. At the beginning, you need to lay out paths, and build buildings along the edges - over time, the base will turn into a full-fledged floating city. Each building has a weight that increases energy consumption for movement, and then completely prevents further construction - as you develop, you will have to create facilitating building devices.
You can't just take and use the caught garbage for construction. You will have to build processing plants for drying wood and working with plastic. There are separate buildings for desalination of water and preparation of seaweed salad - without them, the drifters will die of hunger and thirst. Each building has a unique animation, where workers turn levers or process materials with tools.
Work raises the level of drifters, which allows them to conduct research. You can study the construction of boats, which significantly increase the speed and amount of resources collected, and also allow you to effectively catch fish. There they also allow you to build a building for processing scrap metal or creating various tools. Surprisingly, even using garbage for everyday actions, you can make real technological progress!
Most buildings need energy to operate. At the beginning, wood acts as fuel, which is also needed for construction. Over time, you can use electricity - laying wires throughout the city. It is generated by various generators that run on pedal power or found gasoline. However, it took me an indecent amount of time to find the right factory for processing old electronics, but it is necessary to transfer capacity to a new type of energy!
An important stage is arriving at islands and semi-submerged buildings. Everything in the buildings will come in handy in the household: furniture, old electronics, canned food, scrap metal. On the islands, you can collect wood, and if you're lucky, vegetables that survived the disaster. Some resources require tools to collect, which you will also have to spend money on.
Periodically, drifters can be found on the islands - additional workers who need food and housing. If you find specialists, they will unlock new branches for research that are related to their specialty: electricity, farming, medicine. The found DJ unlocks a radio tower, thanks to which specialists will be marked on the map one at a time.
Many specialists are located in contaminated areas. Here, interaction with objects leads to an increase in the level of pollution - you will have to equip the drifters' housing with a filtration system and build buildings associated with the doctor you have picked up. Otherwise, pollution will lead to illness of residents. If you decide to extract resources in the infected area, you will need to build buildings in which the catch is cleaned of the adhering muck.
In the later stages, the city becomes self-sufficient. Most buildings run on electricity, and farms allow you to grow your own food. You can even train seagulls to help you! It becomes possible to afford such luxury as building decorations for the city and cooking delicacies for the drifters. All that remains is to move between the islands, collect parts for rare tools, fuel for generators, and complete tasks.
Diagnosis
At first it seems that Flotsam is a relaxing game, but it's not! If the passage looks like a peaceful movement through the water, then for survival you will have to constantly drag resources from everywhere, and distribute them between constantly increasing production capacities. The game has a huge number of mechanics that are not very convenient to keep in your head.
For a modest price of 465 rubles, the game is worth giving a chance - especially considering the 50% discount that the developers offer on the occasion of the release from early access.
Pro:
- Beautiful views of the vast ocean
- A large number of diverse mechanics
- Space for creativity
- A large number of animations associated with the activities of drifters
Contra:
- Heavy load on the system at the beginning of the passage
- Towards the end, the number of mechanics exceeds all conceivable limits
- Rare, but still unpleasant bugs
