I keep dying at the same place. It’s been three or four times now and several hours of play. I’m fed up. On my last go I thought I’d nailed it. I’d patiently built up my two-person, one-dog team, driving hundreds of miles from the West Coast of America towards East Coast America, ostensibly to find refuge from an alien invasion of some kind. I’d kept my car repaired and fuelled, collected useful supplies, but then I made one silly mistake and undid it all in a heartbeat. I blew my humans up. I drove the abandoned car into the roadblock at the end of my turn rather than the beginning and so didn’t have time to run clear. An hour or so of gameplay exploded before my eyes.
OverlandDeveloper: Finji/Adam SaltsmanPublisher: FinjiPlatform played: Nintendo SwitchAvailability: Out 19th Sep (yesterday) on PC (itch.io and Steam), Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and Apple Arcade.
This is how it goes in Overland. It’s how you learn. Each road trip’s failure teaches you a new thing, somehow, about how the game works. It’s a brutal kind of teaching method but it’s not the only game to do it, and the feeling of satisfaction that comes from overcoming challenges like this can be great.
So here I am again, on my umpteenth try, trying to get through the roadblock. There’s a lot of fire, there are a lot of enemies, and despite all the painstaking build up, I’m soon on my knees. I’m terrified as I order one of my characters to plough through two enemies to the exit, because if it doesn’t work, if the car takes too much damage and erupts in flame, and then blows up, I am seriously done with this. So I give the command and I hold my breath, and to my delight, this time I steam through.
I would have been so embarrassed to give up there because the zone I was on, Woodlands, is only zone two. Yeah, . But what else was I supposed to do? Trying and failing had been my experience for several hours, and I like to think I’m not an idiot all the time. It was only sheer determination for review’s sake, really, which pushed me to continue.