NUTS – A Surveillance Msytery
The gameplay basically consists of a series of repetitive runs
£4.99/month (Apple Arcade) FROM Noodlecake, nuts.game NEEDS macOS 11 or later
Nuts begins with a simple premise: you are venturing into the forest on a research mission to document the area’s squirrels. You place cameras where you think you might see the furry critters, then return to your cabin to review the recordings. But as the game progresses, the story takes a dark turn.
The first thing you will notice about the game is its standout colour palette. Each successive chapter sees the world daubed in different hues from the last, and no matter whether you are deep in the forest or stranded in a car reclamation yard, the stylish tint makes everything look pretty, especially on a large Mac screen. (Nuts is also available on iOS, iPadOS, and Apple TV). The stylised colour scheme has the added benefit of making collectibles and objects of interest much more apparent.
That is about where the good stuff ends, though. The gameplay basically consists of a series of repetitive runs: Place your cameras, review the footage, adjust your cameras, review the footage. There is a lot of back and forth with not much to do in between. You can ‘print’ stills of what you capture and store them in your journal for when you are out, but if you forget to do so – or simply want to rewatch the recordings – you are out of luck, as you lose the footage once you move the cameras. As a result, you can end up wasting a day placing your equipment more in hope than expectation.
A tough nut to crack
Much of the squirrel tracking feels like needless busywork. The squirrels often take meandering routes that lead you in circles for multiple nights in a row, meaning reaching your goal can take many more days than necessary and making the whole thing feel drawn out. Combined with the back-and-forth gameplay, it is not much fun, leaving you with just the story to draw you along.
Worse, there is no manual saving and very infrequent autosaving – in fact, the game will only be saved when you complete a chapter, no matter how long that takes. Halfway through a chapter and your game crashes? MacBook run out of battery? Need to turn off your Mac? Well, that’s too bad, as you are going to be punished by losing potentially hours of progress. Every time you advance to a new day or evening, the screen goes blank and is covered by large text noting the current day. This would be a perfect opportunity for an autosave, yet apparently the developers did not think of this.
The saving grace is the ending, which almost rescues the entire game by itself. It throws a curveball and leaves many questions unanswered, but in a very satisfying, revelatory way – once you complete Nuts, it feels like these questions no longer matter. It is just a shame the rest of the game could not be as enjoyable. Alex Blake