- Joined
- Jan 23, 2015
If you don't like menu-driven games I'll save you the time and just suggest leaving right now. NEO Scavenger definitely isn't the game for everyone, as its play-style isn't particularly comparable to any other game that I can think of save for some obscure Newgrounds game that literally only you even remember playing, but if you're open to exploration, if menus don't bug you, or you have an interest in becoming a haunted meth-addict who dismantles entire cults by pitching rocks at them until you've murdered thousands of innocent people, stolen their garments and snuck into their temple to give their cult leader an existential crisis, clothed yourself in meme shirts and werewolf skins, and subsisted entirely on pond water and human flesh until you meet your inevitable demise at the hands of oncoming traffic because you clicked the wrong button, you might find that NEO Scavenger is the game for you.
It's definitely not a new game by any stretch; it released in 2014 to fairly mild fanfare and lots of bewildered expressions, and even though SsethTzeentach put out a video that boosted interest in the game last year, most people were likely driven off by the inability to even understand what the fuck the game was trying to sell you, as the Steam page doesn't make it tremendously clear and pictures don't really help shed any light on the gameplay, either. If anything, pictures just make this game seem more confusing.
This is a game about choices, unfairness, cannibalism, and beating the shit out of motherfuckers who wake you up in the middle of the night to try and steal the 3 ketchup packets you forgot to pick up off the ground. This is a game about picking a seemingly-innocuous dialog option and watching helplessly as your super-geared hobo runs headlong into traffic and gets mangled by a car. This is a game about pushing shopping carts loaded with trash bags full of ammunition through an open field, only for your cart to break and dump its contents all over the place, leaving you to frantically try and reassemble it, give up and scream profanity, and then inevitably wind up having to beat up more motherfuckers because apparently homeless people can smell loot from 10 miles away.
Essentially it would be a very accurate Detroit simulator, save for the fact that there doesn't appear to be a single black person anywhere in the game, firmly cementing this in the realm of high fantasy or some sort of post-apocalyptic, cyber-dystopia set in the early 1900s. This is helped all-the-more by the fact that the game takes place in Detroit, sometime in the far-flung future, or the past, or maybe next week, but to be honest I sort of gleaned over that lore because I didn't give a shit.
As with any good hobo simulator, you start off by picking your strengths and weaknesses, and since NEO Scavenger is not fair and not balanced, if you pick anything other than Strong, Tough, and Melee, it's because you enjoy having your ass kicked. Every skill and trait has a time and a place--some of them significantly more useful than others--but if you just want to be a rage-powered lunatic who beats everything to death with a crowbar, you really can't go wrong with those three, especially if you're playing the game for the first time. Ranged and Hiding are also acceptable, because holy mother of shit is the sling an overpowered weapon.
Once you're done picking the only three traits worth giving a shit about, you wake up in a cryogenic storage facility, beat the living shit out of a werewolf, steal the security tape because the video of you kicking the shit out of it is badass, and if you took Trapping for whatever reason, then you wear its skin like a cape. This is not hyperbole or over exaggeration, that home video is going to let you skip some profoundly annoying bullshit later in the game, and having a werewolf skin cape is not only fashionable, but it ensures that you only have a 50% chance of dying over the next dozen turns instead of a 90% chance.
What happens from here is largely up to the player, but if you're brand new to the game my advice is to head into the woods, immediately find a big fucking stick, and use it to thrash any homeless people who come anywhere near you while you're trying to scrounge up emoji backpacks, mismatched Crocs, and half-rusted pans to boil pond water. Much more often than not, you'll get absolutely dicked by the RNG within the first week, fail to find a single thing worth caring about, and wind up getting your Ethiopian hoarder stash taken away from your mangled body because you don't understand that combat's really something best avoided whenever possible, because boiling ripped shirts to make sterilized bandages is a pain in the ass.
By now, you may have also noticed that you've been walking around with your very own Sonichu medallion. This is not the source of all of your powers, this is the source of not getting the meth-loving shit beaten out of you by the Ghost of Detroit's Auto Industry. There's some relatively interesting lore to be found if you manage to take it down, but the odds are that you're not going to be that strong or that lucky for quite awhile, so it's really best to just keep zapping to the extreme and worry about making your way to the lower-East side of the map, without going too low, or you're going to wind up in mini Vietnam and have a wonderful time dealing with the year-long repercussions for rolling around in Agent Orange 2.
Detroit Megacity is where you're going to spend an awful lot of your time ferrying loot, stocking up on whatever supplies a homeless kleptomaniac could ever want, and if you're particularly successful, it's where you'll eventually be able to purchase cybernetic upgrades to become the next T-1000. The T stands for "trash." There are
It's not a particularly lengthy game (Providing you can survive longer than a week) and I doubt that most people could squeeze hundreds of hours out of it, but it's got a surprising amount of depth for such a janky shitmess and there really isn't much else out there that's quite like it. It's a bit like "Baby's First CDDA" except without the monsterous modding scene or the sensation that some nerd's trying to trick you into programming an OS by disguising it as a survival game. Either way, NEO Scavenger actually has a free demo on Steam, and it's even free-er if you want to "try" it, but otherwise it's an absolutely unfair piece of shit so head on over to Detroit, shank someone and snort all of the thyroid medication in their pockets, use broken glass to cut all of your jeans into jorts, and when you're done with that give NEO Scavenger's demo a try.
You'll hate every second of it, I promise.
Read everything.
Always have a fire source.
Don't shirk the sling.
Watch your durability.
There is no permanent storage.
Bum Fights for Fun and Profit.
Modding made easy.
After awhile you'll have enough familiarity with the statuses and random events to not have to worry about it so much, but at the beginning of the game it's very important to read every tooltip, every dialog choice, and especially every status effect. If you come across a hobo who is also using Strong/Melee/Tough, you're not going to want to handle this guy in melee range unless you know what you're doing, or unless you plan to do a significant amount of parrying while you wait for a vulnerable status or a 'create obstacle' prompt.
Always have a fire source.
This is less important or even completely unimportant if you've taken Trapper as they can build fires purely through foraged material, but a lighter only takes one inventory slot, a fire is the primary means for cooking food, sterilizing bandages and purifying pond water, so at the very beginning of the game one of your highest priorities is to find a lighter and a tin can, pressure cooker, or metal pot. You can get by with a makeshift tinfoil pot, but I really wouldn't recommend it.
Don't shirk the sling.
It may be a dumpy or pointless weapon in just about any other game ever made, but David swears by it and a sling is one of the easiest things to craft in this game and rocks are literally all over the place. I've had entire playthroughs before where I've literally not bothered to pick up things like shotguns and hunting rifles purely because the sling was so much easier to maintain and keep stocked on ammo. A character with Ranged and Hide skill can almost always absolutely destroy an enemy before they get anywhere near them just by pitching rocks with their sling.
Watch your durability.
Every single piece of gear and equipment in NEO Scavenger is going to lose durability over time and there's really nothing that you can do about it for most of the gear in the game. Backpacks are going to fall apart, weapons are going to break, shoes are going to tatter, and if you've managed to load down a "vehicle" full of loot, enjoy watching it collapse at the least-opportune moment, spilling an entire inventory of bullshit all over an open field while you were on your way back to town to pawn off your hobo hoard.
Mercifully, not all gear is created equally. Sharpened sticks may only be good for a handful of back-alley encounters and those half-eaten Crocs you found in a trailer park might only last to the front door, but the better the gear, the longer it's going to last you. That pair of Tweaker Timbs is going to be good for stomping on enough skulls to leave you bored with the idea, and a crowbar is probably to outlast you, given that the average meth-head seems to live somewhere between 15-30 days.
There is no permanent storage.
This isn't one of those survival-crafters where you find some armpit of a hole somewhere and just keep stocking up food and ammo until you could sate Hamberlynn and lay a ground war with China, NEO Scavenger is all about what you can carry with you and what you have to leave behind. With a decent grasp of how concealment works and a lot of luck, you can reasonably store items in campsites, but it's never a 100% guarantee that a wandering hobo isn't going to stumble across it and make off with your collection of saltine packets. It's not a bad idea to leave small 'pit stop' sites dotted around the map, but it's better to assume the gear's probably going to go missing the moment you put it into "storage" than it is to rely on it being there when you need it.
Also keep in mind that enemies will use whatever they loot. I wouldn't recommend making a stockpile of military gear, rage-inducing meth-gas, and shotgun ammo, and I definitely wouldn't recommend interrupting the person looting your stockpile and huffing all of your paint with the intent of punching him in the face, because he's going to punch you back a lot harder with a virtually limitless supply of buckshot.
Bum Fights for Fun and Profit.
Fighting isn't always the best idea in NEO Scavenger, in fact it's usually a pretty shitty idea. It damages your gear, it eats into your medical supplies, it could set you up with a whole host of infections or interesting diseases, or more likely than not you'll just wind up mangled beyond all recognition and be staring at the New Game screen. Unless you can guarantee that you'll get the jump on someone, it's better to just fuck off and live to huff spraypaint another day. Even better, though, is tricking everyone into beating the crap out of each other so you can swoop in at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, pitch a single rock at whoever survived, and load your grid down with so much loot that even your crackhead chariot can't hold even half of it.
Enemies tend to follow tracks, but aren't particularly clever about it. Stay hidden, double-back across your own tracks and cover the ones you don't want them to find, and without too much hassle you can pit one group of addicts against another group of paint-huffers and then just sit back and watch the (one or two remaining) teeth fly. If you've taken Ranged to make use of the extra 10 'tiles' of range on the sling, have fun pelting idiots with rocks and running away while they succumb to the long-range retardation you're donating to their surprised faces.
Modding made easy.
Seriously, there's only two worth caring about and so far as I know, they're not even compatible with each other. You can go with either Extended NeoScav or Mighty (mini) Mod of Doom. They both expand the base content of the game to add new gear, encounters, and dialog, but they're not capable of stacking with each other so just pick whichever one you think suits you the best. Personally, I just prefer Extended NeoScav because I think the sprite work and overall feel of the mod blends in much better to the base experience than M(m)MD, to the point where it can be genuinely difficult to tell which parts are actually modded and which parts are just part of the base game.
Strangely enough, the clown mask is not actually a mod.
