Lens Island instal the new version for apple

For example, the motivation of ‘if I can just get across this frozen lake, get inside, and make a fire I just might live through the night’ provides survival games with a stickiness that keeps you locked in the world, and invested in the state of your character.įrameborder='0' allow='accelerometer autoplay clipboard-write encrypted-media gyroscope picture-in-picture' allowfullscreen>Ĭombat deep in Len’s underground system of caves (which hold their own stories) is serviceable, and there’s an impressive list of weapons to buy or craft, but Len’s Island’s easy-breezy approach to structure left me feeling non-committal towards its few avenues of advancement and lack of personal stakes in any of what I built. What’s missing is the pull of incentivised moment-to-moment goals. Len’s Island is so averse to placing pressure on the player that there are rarely moments where I was left thinking ‘I must do this’ rather than ‘I suppose I should do this’.

However, Len’s Island’s complete dearth of direction or any real goal to speak of is where the friction began for me. Resource collection (wood, stone, clay, grass, limestone, the list goes on…) in the game is forgivingly straightforward, with all tools necessary already in your possession the moment your little raft kisses the shoreline for the first time. Its art style speaks in an accent somewhere between Runescape and Valheim by way of a truly beautiful day-night cycle. There are times when this works and the island’s portrayal of coastal beauty, with truly biblical, glorious levels of natural sea-side splendour, goes a long way to greasing the loops of Len’s Island. Whichever way you slice it, the game will aim to provide you with an interesting gameplay loop. The pitch of Len’s Island is that its open, welcoming structure means that from the get-go, you can choose to be everything from a humble lumberjack to a daring adventurer in the caves beneath the island. The only meters you’ll need to keep an eye on are those for health and hunger (with your health depleting should you refuse to eat), and you are already capable of building a wide variety of wooden, stone and ornate structures. In Flow Studio’s vision of a good survival game, you arrive ready-made and equipped into a landscape ripe for your own self-expression. Read: Len’s Island nearly put developer Julian Ball in hospital These are sins of the genre that Len’s Island either does away with completely, or attempts to improve. Unnecessary pressures on the player, juggling five different condition gauges, and a genre-wide inability to provide both compelling creative building tools alongside engaging, satisfying combat. To describe something as a ‘survival crafting building game’ is about as meaningless as calling something a ‘rogue-like’ for all it tells you about the way something is going to make you feel so I point you to that sun-kissed, glorious welcome to island shores that tells you Len’s Island is a game for you, not against you a disposition which is both its greatest strength and weakness as it launches in Early Access.ĭeveloper Flow Studio has gone on record essentially saying that Len’s Island is their answer to everything they see wrong in the survival genre. Len’s Island finds itself slated more towards the perpetually welcoming and optimistic outlook of Stardew Valley than the tense and white-knuckled, resource-driven survival of the aforementioned The Long Dark. You’re supposed to be here, as if this was always your home. The wind blows softly through the trees like an applause. The soft strings and keys of the soundtrack herald your arrival.

In the Australian-developed Len’s Island, you wash onto the shores of an idyllic, tropical land. Awaking within the twisted carcass of an airliner in The Forest crunching tentatively through the snow in The Long Dark diving into the foreboding promise of some alien ocean in Subnautica. The opening minutes of effective survival games really set the tone of what’s to come.

Lens Island instal the new version for apple