Planet Explorers is notable for being a survival game with a main plot. So far, the story has been pretty simple. You crash-land on a planet, and you have to explore it. . .
Okay, we're done here, folks. Pack it all up. It's been a great 4 years. . .
Seriously, though, there's just not that much too it, yet. Two hours in and I'm still in that quasi-tutorial stage where each mission the NPCs send me on teaches me something about the game's rules. You know, stuff like "go fetch me these four ingredients so I can brew you a health potion . . . oh, you did it, thanks. As a reward, I will teach you how to brew yourself a health potion."
Real standard stuff. I'm glad it exists, because it's more fun than reading a manual or scrolling through a wiki, but there's nothing to have insight into. It's really just laying pipe for the story to come.
That might be interesting, though. Your spaceship at the start of the game looked like it was right on course for a smooth landing when suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, some unidentifiable thing comes out of nowhere a slams into it, creating utter pandemonium as your main ship disintegrates in mid-air and everyone who can make it to an escape pod evacuates the vessel. Now, you have to find those scattered survivors and perhaps piece together what happened, discovering the truth behind the mission's mysterious catastrophe.
Or, at least, I assume that's where it's going. Because I've been stuck in a hole for the last hour.
And it started so nice, too. After just one hour, the game gave me a motor vehicle of my very own. It was neat. It dramatically increased my overland movement speed, allowing me to cross distances in mere minutes that might well have taken me tens of minutes on foot. And roughly five minutes after getting it, I drove it into a hole and I've been frantically trying to get it out ever since.
It hasn't been easy. It doesn't like to climb up hills, and the walls of this whole are perfectly sheer. Some even overhang the hole entirely, like the roof of a cave. My situation wouldn't be so bad in Space Engineers, where I could deconstruct my vehicle entirely and just rebuild it on the surface. And even if I wanted to avoid that for some reason, the starting drill operates at roughly five times the speed of the shovel in Planet Explorers.
I'm left here with a pretty serious choice. Either I can double down on the sunk cost fallacy and do whatever it takes to get my bike out of the pit or I can just abandon it and hope the story gives me another vehicle. Neither path seems ideal, but those are my options.
. . . Unless . . . I throw caution to the wind, hop on my bike and ride deeper into the cave structure. There just might be a more gently sloped exit at the other side of this all. It's risky, though. Not too far into the cave there's another cliff that would take be just as much effort to surmount. I may well be doing nothing but doubling my effort for no gain.
I suppose I could explore on foot and then, after I'm finished, come back for my bike, but who wants to read about a Planet Explorer who always plays it safe?
I'm sure they'd much rather read about a Planet Explorer who spent 20 hours trapped in a hole instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment