DRAKE HOLLOW

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is at the heart of every survival game. Here, however, the bottom tier of the pyramid gets a long overdue shake-up. To food, water, warmth and rest, you can add yoga balls and creepy dolls. And yes, these do count as essentials in a world where characters can literally die of boredom.

Then again, Drake Hollow isn’t really a conventional survival game. It’s not your own well-being you need to worry about; rather, it’s that of the titular plant creatures, who represent your ticket out of a world you’ve basically been tricked into saving. Once you’ve unearthed them in the wild, the Drakes come to live in a village of your own making. It starts as a small plot, where you’ll place down thatch mats as makeshift beds, alongside food and juice boxes to keep your little helpers fed and watered while you scavenge supplies and schematics to build proper beds, planters and a well.

It’s a response of sorts to The Molasses Flood’s debut, The Flame In The Flood, whose exacting systems didn’t give you much chance to properly enjoy its gorgeous world. “We wanted to give the player an opportunity to build more, in a more expressive way,” creative director Forrest Dowling tells us. “I wanted to try moving away from the oppressiveness of a survival game: there’s a tension that’s cool, but it’s not the only thing I want to explore.”

The building elements go hand-inhand with territory expansion, but this isn’t a game about conquering a world. A poisonous mist, Aether, covers much of the land, effectively turning it into a series of islands. Crafting a crystalline artefact offers temporary protection, letting you forage further before returning home. And though you’ll need to make sure the Drakes’ needs are met, you can quickly stockpile items and get on with exploring without constant meter-watching.

Still, you’ll want to keep coming back. Your inventory is limited to 100 items – and The Molasses Flood is not planning to expand it. And the Feral, spiky enemies that don’t appreciate your presence here, will launch occasional raids on your base. You’ll encounter them in the wild, too. At first, they’re easily despatched – even if melee combat feels a little sluggish and ammo for ranged weapons is fairly scarce. But they’re more of a concern when attacking your village. The Drakes have good self-preservation instincts, but everything you’ve built can be smashed up. Fences buy you time, but the more you’ve built, the bigger and stronger the hordes will be.

Even if you’re a distance away, you can instantly teleport back home care of another crystal creation. And these raids offer further encouragement to develop your burgeoning supply network. Locate abandoned trucks and you can connect them to waypoints of your own making and placement, as long as there’s an uninterrupted line of sight between the two. A glowing rail then appears to link the two, and you can ride it to speed from island to island, letting you cover greater distances without spending your valuable crystals on a fast-travel substitute.

“We wanted to give the player an opportunity to build more, in a more expressive way”

While your own health isn’t paramount, you can still die in the field, though it’s not much of a setback. You can respawn at base, with weapon durability taking a hit. Or you can run back to your corpse as a spirit and revive it, the only penalty being time and inconvenience. And that’s no hardship with a functioning supply network: “You can rail grind when you’re dead,” Dowling says, giving us an early frontrunner for our favourite videogame feature of 2020.

It all fits together very nicely. We take pride in our handiwork as our settlement takes shape, and experience a pang of guilt when two of our Drakes die of boredom (one yoga ball between five is not enough, it seems) and we arrive back to a pair of graves. Dowling says his team is focused on developing the emotional connection with the critters, and that’s a wise move – by the time two headstones have become five, we sense we’re prioritising the wrong things. We like the little guys; now it’s up to The Molasses Flood to make us love them.

ABOVE There are no skill trees or character classes, so if a horde of Feral should suddenly spawn on a bridge – reader, we yelped – you’ll need some decent weapons and a few heals prepared. TOP RIGHT Fangs are tricky blighters, quickly zipping out of range and gobbing projectiles your way. They can, however, be batted back with a well-timed swing. MAIN The studio has adopted a light-touch approach to narrative. “The kind of storytelling that we’re interested in is definitely mechanics-driven,” Dowling tells us. BELOW LEFT Weapons might degrade but they’re more durable than you might think – and the Drakes can repair them, too. BELOW RIGHT Each island tends to have a landmark or two. Reaching high ground is useful for scoping out the lie of the land, and considering checkpoint locations