Savage Lands: A Non-Review

Thanks to those of you who chimed in to answer my question about whether you’d be interested in reading non-anime content. 🙂 The general consensus seems to have been “yes, as long as you avoid the minefields inherent in talking about politics and religion.”

So today let’s talk about Savage Lands. Fanatical.com has a bundle offer for the next couple of weeks that includes SL, so I picked it up. It’s in beta, but so far I haven’t noticed many rough edges. For the moment it’s my go-to game that I look forward to at the end of the work day.

So what is SL? It’s a sandbox survival game, with gritty, first-person graphics and action. After customizing your character (only male options, as far as I can see), you show up exiled on this island where some tragedy has left the former hamlets in smoking ruins. Pages of lore scattered around, usually lying next to inactive skeletons, give fragmented hints of what happened, and of what could happen to you.

Not all the skeletons are inactive, by the way.

When my character, Zok (hey, he kind of looked like a caveman), spawned, he found a few damaged buildings and a firepit to set up camp in. Since it was freezing out (his first death came from losing too much heat in the icy river), the fire was a godsend. He already had some meat in his pack, along with a helmet, boots, and a club.

The club was a bone and a skull tied together. Classy.

He ate some meat to keep hunger at bay. He ate some berries that he found growing in the brush, and they helped. He ate some random mushrooms and got sick. Live and learn.

Destroying buildings gave him a handful of materials to work with on his own projects, but not nearly as many as went into making them. In the end, he found it easier to repair the old structures than to bulldoze them and start afresh.

There was an abundance of materials to live off of all around him. Life was a walk in the park, except for the skeletons who kept wandering by in a rather antisocial funk.

And the boars.

And the wolves.

And the OH MY GOD THAT’S A FRIKKIN’ DRAGON BREATHING FIRE STREAMS!!!!!

To be continued, maybe…