Scapeland – PC Review – by K3W3L
Genre: Action, Adventure, Casual, Indie
Developer: 3100 games Publisher: 3100 games
Release Date: Mar 31, 2016
Scapeland is a prime example of why you should read up on what the game is about before coming in and purchasing to play. 5 students from the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences (under the name of 3100 games) were tasked to develop a game within 4 months (1 semester), and this was the result.
The problem is, the Steam store page pitches this game as mainly a farming game. The only mention of anything otherwise are the words “…or is it?”, “more than meets the eye”, as well as well as 25 seconds into the video and 2 images in the store page. Most of the video itself is devoted to the farming section of the game – however, it won’t encompass most of your game playtime. Rather, the later stealth mode and endless runner mode is where you will spend most of your playtime – if you have the patience. I’ll elaborate on that in a bit.
Let’s start off with the farming mode, which is what you get at the start of every new game. You start out with a limited amount of money, a farm with 6 spots for plants, and a chicken that repeatedly tries to escape. (I’m serious. Even if your chicken pen is closed, during the night it will sometimes magically open the door and wander out of it.) You collect chicken eggs and the plants for money, then buy more seeds from a nearby vendor and then plant them, then you go to bed, harvest the new plants and eggs, and repeat.
Then everything changes when the fire nation attacked, er, the army raids and you lose your farm. This is where I personally feel that the game’s lack of a proper worded story really hurts it. Why? WHY does the army just come out of nowhere and raid the farm?? You aren’t given any explanation whatsoever, you just have to flee and leave the farming life behind.
What this means, though, is that the farming part of the game is but a footnote to what mostly happens in the game, instead serving as a glorified tutorial of sorts to the controls that you will need to play the stealth mode. It’s a huge shame for a few reasons – there is absolutely NO incentive to play the farming mode properly, instead just skipping all the days for the stealth mode to start. Also, despite a few quirks (in that, for example, to plant a seed packet you have to THROW it into the space) the farming mode proved to be the funniest and best mode of the lot. I honestly feel that if they expanded the farming game mode into a full and proper game, it would be a nice casual game for people to pick up.
In stark comparison, once you are out of the farming mode you progress to a completely unsatisfactory stealth mode. For a game that is touted as “short and sweet”, the first stealth mode level proved to be a completely frustrating experience. There were no checkpoints whatsoever in that level, so anytime I failed, I had to restart from the very beginning. There is VERY little margin for error – that level was unforgiving if you make a small slip-up. Even the minutest of mistakes are punished, too – there was a part where I had to tiptoe quietly behind the backs of 2 army soldiers. If I was even a TINY bit too close to one of the men, they would turn around and I’d have to restart the level.
I took quite a while to finally clear that level. Then came the next one – an endless runner style level basically in the style of Temple Run. Oh joy. Much like the stealth mode, it was relentless and unforgiving, and if you failed you would have to sit through a silly surrender cutscene. Whatever happened to instantaneous restarts like in Super Meat Boy? I’d rather not waste more time in between deaths just waiting for the level to restart.
I genuinely could not take any more of this by the time I hit the 4th level – another stealth level. The awkward rapid spikes in difficulty was something I could not stand. Was I having fun at that point? Nope.
Ultimately, this combination of 3 game modes in one made me feel 2 completely contrasting things. On one hand, when tied in with the story, it is a potentially ingenious concept. On the other hand, this however demonstrates a gross lack of content in each of the 3 game modes, such that they had to be combined into one game. I’m also not entirely happy with the fact that, as mentioned earlier, there’s nearly ZERO mention whatsoever of the stealth and runner modes. Just look at the Steam reviews – a fair amount of the negative ones are displeased that what was mostly touted as a farming game takes it away from you without warning. Even a thread in the Steam forums had a person whose child was disappointed when the farming mode ended. I’d like to stress once again that if you research on what the game is about before jumping in, you can alleviate some of the potential disappointment, as I’ve done so – unfortunately, most of my disappointment in this game lies with the stealth and runner modes, which are a HUGE turn-off.
On the bright side, I liked the minimalist aesthetics of the game, and the music design was appropriate. The latter is, however, let down by the difficulty of the stealth and runner levels, as the repetition of those levels eventually makes the music feel rather boring.
Pros:
Presumably short
Interesting minimalist graphics
Cheery and humourous farming mode
Decent music variety…
Cons:
…but due to the nature of the game it gets VERY repetitive
Wordless story (yes, I know it’s a design decision, but still)
Stealth mode feels overly difficult and unforgiving…
…and so is the endless runner mode…
…and the fact that these two modes go all but unmentioned on the store page.
K3W3L gives Scapeland a Drastik Measure 4.0 out of 10 (40).
I commend the team’s effort in coming up with a game, and the concept of it at the very least, and look forward to seeing what they come up with in the future. BUT, and this is a huge BUT, ultimately I feel that the execution of the individual game modes is sub-par. The difficulty also appears to artificially pad the game with extra length and frustration – I was no longer having fun after a few hours. When games are supposed to be a method for you to have fun, that is practically a death knell. The fact that this game got bundled 19 days after release on Steam therefore does not surprise me at all.
