I bought this game on impulse because of the STALKER-looking aesthetic, but who am I kidding — the game is boring to me.
Functionally it works by design, but it's boring.
Repetition in games I understand, but this is a waste of time as a solo player.
I recommend ‘Into The Radius’, the ‘STALKER GAMMA’ mod, or ‘Road to Vostok’ instead.
[h3]The Grindy Loop[/h3]
MISERY is a rogue-lite survival scavenger with a touch of extraction shooter.
There is a brief start where you must quickly find starter items in a building before time runs out. By yourself, pockets are thin, so hardly any useful item comes with you.
From there, you go out to explore the anomaly zone to find loot. furniture, consumables, and scrap to bring back to the bunker, used to craft base workstations and power.
Sirens sound off when an Emission happens, which reshapes the map and respawns items each time. Each season has its own aesthetic and grid sets.
Unwanted and old food items can be incinerated for ash, then used as fertilizer for plants in pots to grow edible food.
Progress is too slow when solo. The world is unforgiving, especially with radiation and gun-toting NPCs. Buying or making a gun is a long-term grind that I don't have time for.
[h3]The Economy Problem[/h3]
Even in Tarkov or STALKER, my meager finds have value to sell. MISERY does not have that, so I ended up spending hours finding nothing worth the trip. Worse is dying to anomalies, or getting shot at or lost when the emission timer ran out.
STALKER has broken weapons too, but I can find parts to strip and rebuild them. MISERY offers nothing like that.
Because food and water are bad finds out in the zone, the money I do get from selling items goes straight to clean food and water — and that's expensive. On a bad run, I'm back to square one.
Multiple other people say it's mainly fun in a group, and carry capacity scaling with player count effectively multiplies loot-per-trip for co-op while leaving solo players doing the same walks for a fifth of the haul.
