Review: Miasmata

[Hottentot]

While waiting for opportunity to write another AAR, I decided to amuse myself and you with another review. I'm a somewhat sucker for good game sales, and Miasmata happened to be heavily discounted on GOG not too long ago. Having played it a while now and thinking it might be something of interest for sim players, I was actually a little surprised to learn there was no thread about it yet. So here we go.



Trapped in paradise

Miasmata has been marketed as a survival game and some have even put it in the survival horror genre. While it has elements of these, I wouldn't call it a survival game and even less a survival horror game. It has a somewhat unique concept and is therefore difficult to label properly. The closest description I can come up with would be ”exploration game”.

Miasmata throws you in an uninhabited island with very simple objectives given from the start: find a cure for a plague that your character has and, after curing yourself, find a way out. That's the plot: minimal and non-intrusive. Sounds easy, huh? Well, it's not. This is not a game where you walk through stages following a certain path and uncovering parts of the island while the game holds your hand. This is a game where you get a huge, unknown island with no invisible walls to stop you. You can go anywhere you want from the beginning. In fact, you must do so. You will get lost. And most of the time you will have no idea where to go next or even where you are.

The gameworld does offer some help, though. Before you have arrived on the island, there has been a research team there. They have been looking for the cure too, but something went wrong. You'll uncover notes they have left behind as well as a few bodies here and there. The notes offer background on the game's plot and world, but also the research the team has managed to conduct and which you can then continue. In some invaluable cases they have even mapped parts of the island, so you don't have to wander in forest aimlessly trying to figure out where you are.

While you won't meet any people, you will meet the local fauna. Most of it doesn't want to kill you. In fact, there is only one that does. And it's pretty good at it too. The so called ”Creature”, a cat like beast, appears every now and then to hunt you. Unlike most other games, Miasmata gives you exactly two choices: hide or run. Or sure, you can also throw a huge feline in the face with a banana and see if you can awaken its inner vegan. You can't kill it: you can, at the best, distract it in order to get more time for hiding and running.

Having an invincible enemy in game that randomly appears to ruin your day might sound like a poor choice for gameplay, but the devs have made a good job in keeping the tension up. The Creature appears rarely enough to make it feel scary when it does, and while it's not a super enemy that automatically means game over, it's not trivially easy to evade either. It brings a good and unexpected ”Oh [beeb]” element to a game that otherwise is peaceful and slow paced exploration in beautiful sceneries.



”Dear diary: today I saw a plant...”

Major part of the gameplay consists of exploring the island and collecting different plants that grow on it. Each time you find a new plant, your character makes notes about it on a journal he carries with him, including a nice hand drawn picture for recognition purposes. The new plants can later be analyzed in field laboratories of the former research team to see what sort of effects they have. Once the plants have been analyzed, they can be synthetized into different medicines. Most can be used alone to create pills that temporarily make your character quicker or more perceptive for example. But some can be combined with others to make drugs that permanently enhance your abilities. The game's ultimate goal, the cure, is created by synthetizing multiple plants into multiple parts of it and finally combining them into the cure. Therefore finding the necessary ingredients is not a simple task. Finding a new plant during your exploration is like opening a Christmas present and going after the ones necessary for the cure based on research notes you find feels like an adventure.

The game does place some utterly dumb limitations for this, though. You can only carry three different plants on your hand at one time. And yes, I said different: you can't have three plants of the same kind on your hand even if you wanted to. You find all sorts of stuff the research team has left behind but apparently not one of them came with a backbag? Or, I don't know, a pair of freaking jeans with pockets! Yet somehow when you leave a plant in storage bin in a field laboratory, the same plant magically appears on the storage bin of a field laboratory on the other side of the island? Uh, convenient I guess, but how is that supposed to make sense?

Exploring the island is more challenging than you might think. If you want to know where you are, you must triangulate your position on the map. This is done by standing somewhere where you can see two landmarks (ruins, statues or similar objects left behind by people that apparently inhabited the island in the ancient past) and clicking them so the character draws lines on the map. The problem is that you don't always know all the landmarks. It's no use standing next to a statue if you don't know where it is. The new landmarks are added to the map only when you triangulate them based on your known landmarks or when you uncover the area they are on by triangulating your own position. So if you, like me initially, start exploring by just going somewhere, no landmark is going to help you to tell where you are.

The low tech feeling of the map reading suits the game well, but there are some inconveniencies in it as well. First of all, only manmade landmarks count. So a huge rock or other natural landmark is not good enough. Second, there is so much vegetation on the island that seeing the landmarks is very challenging. If you are exploring a valley, it becomes next to impossible to see any sort of landmark anywhere unless you are standing on some high place. Sometimes you just have to navigate using compass and intuition. There are some obvious tracks in the forest that will certainly take you somewhere, but that's not necessarily the place you'd want to go.



Ooo, beautif...ow, my spleen!

The game is, without exaggerating the least, bloody gorgeous. It's amazing that this is an indie game created by two men, because they have done better work at creating the atmosphere than some teams of professional developers. The light effects on the island are simply marvelous to look at and the nature with its colors and animals feels realistic without having the ”plastic” look some other games give. You can see far away to places where you can then start heading. Not many games out there have made me stop simply to admire the sunrise. The closest equivalent of this I can think of is Oblivion, and that says a lot.

The times of the day have a real impact on gameplay, because in this game ”dark night” really means ”no magical night vision that makes the night only slightly dimmer day and in no way an obstacle for your exploration, dear almighty player!” When the night falls, your visibility drops to a few metres if even that. Torches help, but are not always available. It's wise to seek bed and continue when the sun comes up again. It's just dumb that you can't decide how many hours you want to sleep or wait, because every hour of light is an hour more for exploring. Since the in-game time advances rapidly, that means you don't want to waste it.

Unfortunately, while the developers have made a beautiful world, they apparently don't have as good grasp of physics. While you are exploring a warm paradise island filled with life, it feels like you'd be walking on ice. There isn't a slope gentle enough and no hill so small that your character wouldn't trip on it and then start rolling down like a snowball. This would make a hilarious let's play video if it wasn't occasionally so infuriating. The character's movement is like a huge truck that you can't stop when it starts picking speed. And it will. Often. And like a truck, it more often than not ends in a crash, no matter how careful you are. Crashing isn't usually dangerous, but for some weird reason you can develop a fever by crashing and then have to make yourself medicine or find a bed to rest. Again, I have no idea how this is supposed to make sense. After playing for a while, you'll learn to deal with it, but can't prevent it completely.



Too long didn't read

If you thought like the subtitle of this chapter, then Miasmata is probably not your game. Miasmata is one of those ”make your own adventure” games. It offers you a world and sparse information to go by, but is no movie nor an action packed trip. If you are not into exploring just to find out what's behind the next hill, this game is not for you. On the other hand, if you like it when the game just offers you the setting and leaves it up to you to use it, you might want to consider trying Miasmata.

Miasmata is a game meant for a patient player, in more than one sense. It has quirks and oddities that you either learn to deal with or leave it. Nothing happens fast (well, except for crashing for the millionth time). If you are the kind of player that just wants to rush from object to the next, Miasmata won't offer you much and you'll probably end up frustrated. If, on the other hand, you'd like to try a game where you can explore a beautiful island in your own pace and every now and then just stop to admire it, then Miasmata is a good choice for you. Despite of its shortcomings, it's a very relaxing and serene experience.

Personally, as you can see from the text, I like it. Yet I won't give it any kind of score, because it's a kind of game that requires a certain kind of player to appreciate. In a forum filled with people who like submarine sims, I think such people are abundant. While it's on surface completely different to them, in my opinion Miasmata still has lots of resemblance to games like Silent Hunter 3 in the general atmosphere and the pace, though it's of course still much more peaceful than any Silent Hunter. Therefore, if you recognized yourself from this text, I suggest giving it a go if you can pick it up for cheap somewhere.

I'll post some screenshots on this thread later, but meanwhile have a look at GOG's screens and trailer. They resemble the actual game very well.