Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: DLS_MWZZ

The feeling of staying at home is just cool.

I Am Future, a sci-fi farming game developed by Armenian studio Mandragora, was unveiled at the Steam February festival and was scheduled to launch in May, but has since been delayed until early August. The development team has received a lot of attention for its niche work "Skyhill". A week after its launch, I am the Future received "special praise" on Steam.

After about 10 hours of groping, I have experienced all the contents of the game so far. Generally speaking, "I am the future" is new and interesting, but there are also many minor problems, let me talk about it in detail.

Generally speaking, it is a good experience of skyscraper culture, just like "Dave the Diver" has distinct ocean theme features, "I am the Future" continues the cultural core of the previous production team Mandragora, focusing on the charm of the theme "skyscrapers". The protagonist played by the player wakes up from the dormant device and finds himself deep on the top floor of the skyscraper, while the world has been flooded, no one seems to have survived, and he has lost his memory and is forced to do nothing. He began the journey of survival on the skyscraper.

"skyscraper culture" originated in the United States in the 19th century. The word "Skyscraper" appeared in the 1880s. Limited by the architectural level at that time, it was originally used to describe 10-to 20-story buildings, but then gradually extended to 40, 50 or even higher-rise buildings.

There is no doubt that skyscrapers are the product of modern industry. On the one hand, the development of elevator technology enables people to reach higher floors conveniently and safely; on the other hand, towering buildings also need more advanced and reliable material support. As a steel power at that time, the United States had both these two foundations. In addition, in the 1870s and 1980s, several serious fires broke out in Chicago. in the post-disaster reconstruction work, architects gradually replaced the original wooden structure with steel structure. at the same time, to increase the number of floors, "development to the sky" to alleviate the problem of population growth and rising land prices. Subsequently, the "Chicago School" of modern architecture represented by high-rise buildings also spread. Affected by this, skyscrapers, such as buildings, became the intuitive embodiment of the comprehensive indicators of science and technology, resources, production capacity and other comprehensive indicators of a country or region at that time, which is an extreme "man-made miracle".

The first impression of the animation was very good during the period from the 19th century to the 20th century. For the United States, an emerging country that has always been satirized as "uneducated" by old Europeans, the emergence of skyscrapers is an important opportunity to form a new local culture. there is now a special skyscraper museum in New York. The peak of skyscraper culture was in the 1960s and 1970s, and its representative was the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which was once the tallest in the world but no longer exists.

In addition to the "industrial miracle", one of the main cores of skyscraper culture is "residence", which literally means "you don't have to go out". Readers may have heard the story of "Whittier", a strange form of "the whole town lives in one building". For better or worse, this is the embodiment of skyscraper fantasy in reality-using technology to create an ideal environment so that people can live comfortably and normally without leaving the shelter.

These elements naturally match the theme of sci-fi eschatological survival, and are also the attractions of "I am the Future". In particular, few similar games involve sufficiently specific and interesting skyscraper-themed survival and play-in "Raft", skyscrapers only appear as one of the places of the final chapter; domestic game "exile in the cloud" chooses a similar angle, but currently only opens the Steam page, can not experience. In the zombie game craze at the beginning of this century, skyscrapers often appeared, but only as a terrain advantage of "zombies can't climb stairs," or focused on the struggle for "survival" rather than the comfort of "life." From this point of view, "I am the Future" has the feeling of "a single seedling" for both farming games and skyscraper culture.

"Raft" is also skyscraper temperament, but the core is still in the raft and the sea in the "house" aspect, "I am the future" is also relatively in place. Although there is also a necessary exploration of survival farming games in the game, but with a very reasonable packaging, the role played by the player is still sitting on a tall building, and the exploration is done by operated drones. This feeling of staying at home is cool.

In short, for the skyscraper culture, which has been often used as a green leaf element in recent years, "I am the Future" has rarely made it the protagonist, without having to break through the German blockade and enter the rebel base, nor as a stepping stone to impoverished superheroes.

In "German headquarters II: the New Colossus," the rebel headquarters is in a skyscraper with interesting life details depicted in the scene. Mandragora, the production team of "I am the Future," must know skyscrapers, but he doesn't seem to have much experience in farming. Perhaps because of this, there are many innovative attempts in "I am the Future", which do not over-bind the experience of the previous generation's works, and some designs are inevitably flawed and inappropriate, but some designs are worth referring to.

For example, farming games are very critical storage space issues. At present, there is only one kind of box in "I am the Future". The stock is not very high and only supports 10 squares, but there are a lot of items at the beginning of the game, and this design would be a bit annoying at first were it not for the official "refrigerator" NPC sent at the beginning to help players save 10 boxes.

But in the middle of the game, players will be able to unlock technology to get a design that is not common in other games-full storage box networking. After this upgrade, the player's full picture of the storage box is like the "biochemical crisis" dimensional box, free access to any location, access to all the contents of the box. This is so convenient! As a result, players' idea of placing storage boxes has changed and began to be rearranged, such as putting boxes on the spot when exploring new areas without having to travel back and forth. Although it doesn't make sense in common sense, it doesn't stand out in the context of a sci-fi worldview, a bit like the design for resource collection in Galaxy Breaker, which is a good thing for players to experience the game.

The second column on the left, feel the future of logistics technology on this basis, "I am the future" the biggest feature lies in a large number of interactive operations close to reality, especially "garbage removal" is the most typical. Different from the previous "garbage picking up" survival games, there are many waste products made by human civilization in "I am the Future", such as hot water kettles, microwave ovens and so on. Players need to manually disassemble them one by one through a simple and moderate mouse operation. to get the available resources.

This game performs much like some puzzles in a traditional puzzle game, where players need to rotate the whole object in three dimensions, through observation and a little common sense, to find an entry point that can be removed, from the outside to the inside in a reasonable order close to the truth. Many important resources can be obtained through disassembly, and the positive feedback is good, and the first sight is impressive.

At present, its only small disadvantage is that it does not support "skip". Players will face many times, sometimes even continuous disassembly of the same object, for some players who are not enthusiastic about this, it is inevitable to feel boring. Today, most games should be able to skip the content that players have experienced once. I hope the production team can improve it in the future.

Another feature of experiencing the fun of disassembly, but not too tedious, is "cleaning up", which is somewhat similar to the idea of "rush-and-finish simulator". The play route of the game is mainly through upgrading tools to gradually obtain a variety of means of waste decomposition and recycling, and then through a variety of highly simulated QTE-style interactive operation, disassemble all of them, and then build homes in line with their preferences.

These QTE operations are also quite "realistic" to a certain extent, such as sawing things to the end on the left and then on the right, especially like cutting things with a hand-held circular saw in reality; and there is a drill bit, which simulates the feeling of "you can't drill too dead at once" in reality, which has a lot of life. As for the hammer, release it when you have enough strength, and it is quite immersive with the tapping sound of "Ta-da", and the effect of Xu Li is also reflected-if you get it done with two hammers, you will get three hammers before you have enough.

These small details add a lot to the sense of substitution of the game, and the experience is so unique that players who like to dismantle things when they are young will be delighted-in today's classification of popular videos on the Internet, the subject matter of making or renovating objects has a large fixed audience. If people want to experience the feeling of disassembly and cleaning after watching it, "I am the Future" may be a good choice compared to other "simulator" games that focus on realistic complexity.

On the left is the initial mess, and on the right is the comfort after repair, but some of these iterative designs may be too "anti-habitual" for players to understand and accept, the most typical of which is moving buildings. Because the guidance is not very clear, and the stacking effect of other designs, more than one player thinks that the game can't move buildings-in fact, it can, and it has its own way.

In the game, players need to take the "nano transporter" this prop, first use the right button to activate its function, and then the left button to select the building you want to move, and then the left button to determine after arriving at the appropriate location. If the left button selects the building and accidentally presses the right button, the "receive" function will be triggered, and the building will be "gone" due to the deactivation of the nano-transporter, but in fact it still exists, but the icon of the props will be slightly different. After re-pressing the right button to activate, you can use the left button to place it.

Look at this long paragraph of explanation and description, is it super troublesome? Similar works, such as "the rise of the Night Nation", can be moved at will if you directly left-click in the construction mode.

The design of moving the building is really awkward, but it can be used. However, this design still has some unique conveniences with the support of the logical chain of "I am the Future". There is a "storage rack" in the game, which is used to stack wood and steel plates, with a maximum of 10 units on a single shelf. At the same time, in order to serve the interactive reality, players can only hold this material by hand when they transport it themselves, which will not only limit part of the movement ability, but also take up to 3 at a time, but the construction of some buildings requires 5 or even 7 materials. and the materials come from dismantled obstacles, which causes players to run around and toss around.

At this point, the smart you may have thought that the storage rack is a building, so you can move it to or directly build it in an area with relatively abundant and dense resources, and when it is full, you can carry 10 of them at a time with a nano-transporter, without even holding your hand. and this move also overlaps with the subsequent players' play after unlocking the robot assistant. In short, although it is not in line with traditional habits and is not very mature, this kind of design does have a set of closed-loop ideas that may unexpectedly inspire any other inspiration.

One of the side pleasures is to see what kind of ticket did the robot assistant sell because of your move? In fact, the trial version of "I am the Future" has been highly completed, but it still skipped tickets. After the advance version of the jump ticket was launched, the player found that it did not add a lot of things, so it was a little baffling. If we infer the reason from the results, it may be that the production team has some beginnings in farming games, which leads to a lot of problems.

The first big problem, and the most typical problem, is that many of the numbers in the game are very rough, and the cost of some items is completely inconsistent with their returns, such as access to drinking water. In most similar works, water resources generally only need to carry out a treatment process (such as boiling or filtration) on the basis of obtaining raw materials. Although it may be out of touch with reality, water is a basic resource that needs to be operated repeatedly by players. It needs to be properly simplified, or equipped with enough reasonable automation assistance.

The food development in the game is still very interesting, while in I am the Future, the player's drinking water needs to be boiled and filtered. Not only are there many processes, but the charcoal needed for filtration is also high consumption, which must be made by adding wood through a bonfire. A piece of wood can only produce 3 carbon, and water storage also requires the consumption of plastic bottles-layer by layer, the cost of resources in the game, the degree of trouble for players to operate and the time cost of a bottle of water are all very high, but the recovery effect of the food produced by consuming drinking water is very common. In the end, players found that it is the most cost-effective salad that can be made without consuming wood.

By the same token, the construction of some high-end buildings may require several pieces of wood, and if players do not understand the "instantaneous shelf method" mentioned above because of various influences, or if they have not unlocked the technology of transporting more than a few pieces at a time, then there is likely to be a painful experience of having to run around five or six times, which is also a major reason for some poor reviews-from a theoretical point of view. It's not a problem after unlocking everything, but what if the player doesn't get there?

Each white spot is a piece of wood put down on the spot after demolition. How lucky is it? The second big problem is that many of the designs in the game are really new, and the first experience is absolutely new, but they can't help repeating it many times, or the production team lacks predictions about repetitive operations. On the other hand, there is a lot of repetitive work in the survival game, such as sowing, watering and so on. "I am the Future" is far from complete for player operation support in this respect.

The most deadly of these is fishing, which is supposed to be one of the core games in the farming game. The fishing logic of "I am the Future" is a pseudo-random function: it is brushed out in a basically fixed order according to the player's fishing gear and bait. This is supposed to take good care of the players, at least the fish you want to catch must be able to catch. However, after starting with the advanced fishing rod, there is a particularly magical result.

It is amazing for the first time for drones to go out to search, but only one special event scene has been done. In the game, there is a kind of shell bait that needs to be caught empty-handed with a fishing rod. In the primary fishing rod stage, players can only catch shells or low-level garbage material, and the probability is 1:2. The acquisition rate is not too bad. However, after getting the high-grade fishing rod, the high-level fishing rod adds a new kind of acquisition to each level, so the ratio of catching shells, high-level garbage, and low-level garbage becomes 1:1:2, resulting in a decrease in the rate of shells instead of an increase, and the upgrade of the fishing rod is irreversible.

Not to mention, when you need to fish crabs with shells, the crabs have to share pseudo-random functions with fangs and melons, which are also caught by shells, which leads to players who want to get 5 crabs in exchange for reward props, they need to prepare at least 10 shells. So primary school application time: excuse me, how many times do I need to fish for 5 crabs? 50 times! And in case you make a mistake at a critical moment, you have to add a few more times!

Even for players who like to play fishing, this number of times is a kind of torture. As far as I understand it, this should happen in the hell that anglers will go to after death. The only thing that counts in the game experience is that fishing in "I am the Future" does not promote the change of time in the game, the protagonist does not lose the state, and there is indeed a certain harvest of resources, and five crabs are not necessary for the main line, which can be regarded as something that can barely comfort people.

Pay attention to the high-level garbage piled up on the right side of the role that far exceeds the normal requirements.... There are also a lot of small details, such as fake automatic watering machines, very troublesome wire systems, and so on, we can feel that the production team has a set of ideas that are different from the mainstream logic of today's farming games, and they want to innovate. but there is a lack of experience to make up for the problems caused by these ideas, resulting in poor completion. At the same time, at this stage, there are some Bug that will affect the progress of the game, which are a drag on the player's experience.

Conclusion "I am the Future" is a sketch game as a whole, it has very attractive highlights, it is worth playing, especially for farming games, it does provide a lot of new ideas. Even if these ideas do not show themselves well, but to be able to make a finished product is a kind of progress, which is worthy of recognition.

But at present, the game is still not very friendly to the players-for example, it seems convenient to force a separate automatic archive, but it is easy to break the file in case of some accidents. If you are picky about the game experience, it is recommended to wait for the official, at least a major update, repair a variety of Bug. And if you are more experienced farming and production gamers, or science fiction enthusiasts, such as those who like stories like "Wall E," you can try it first.

The "girlfriend" here is a record player. I hope Nora, the "refrigerator sister", will not be jealous.

Advantages

+ many interesting new ideas and designs

+ A skyscraper theme stage rarely found elsewhere

Shortcoming

The completion of − is poor.

− also has a lot of Bug, which can seriously affect the experience.

The farming part of − is a bit "amateur", which needs to be polished and improved.

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