There is a limited amount of daytime in which players can go in search of things. As I made it through each day, it became a balancing act. Let any of those meters get too low and its game over. There are three meters to maintain hunger, heath and sanity. The title of the game is a little misleading, as it isn’t just my belly I had to worry about. All I could do was huddle around the fire and wait for dawn to break, wondering if there is something nasty just beyond the darkness. I learned very quickly that I had to build a campfire before night falls, but even with that, I couldn’t stray outside of the small amount of light it brings. The squeals of a frightened rabbit still freak me out after hours of playing, but it is when night falls that I really felt alone and scared.

A lot of what filled me with dread in this game was what you couldn’t see, and the sounds of the world really go to work on me.

I soon got used to it, which is more than can be said for the sound. It’s all very eerie and gave me an unsettled feeling at first. The world feels alive, as if the very ground under my feet was breathing. This is expressed so well in the design, both art style and sound. It is a dark and evil place, even in the daytime. The world in which players wake up is unique to that play-through, with a new map being generated each restart.

The feeling of triumph I got when I combined my first items, or discovered a new area truly felt like this was all of my own doing, because it was. This is part of its strength letting the player discover things on their own. Although the lack of any direction is a little daunting at first, I found it strangely liberating not having the game tell me where to go, or what to do. From here on in, players are on their own in terms of tutorials. This is the game’s only advice to the player. The advice the man gives Wilson is that night is coming and he would be best off getting prepared for it. Players control Wilson the Scientist (at first), who wakes up in a strange land, with a strange man towering over him.

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