Retreat To Enen

The game is mainly about death, because you die often trying to sort out how to play the game. There is no manual and there are no player guides, the player base and the Dev help to get you started but what they gave only got me through a couple of game days. The biggest headache is the shortage of food and flowers. Food you need to survive, you can pick fruit but it doesn't last you very long and it takes a long time to grow back. You can make a spear and can kill things in the local area but they only give a food called small meat and for some reason there is no way to cook it. You need to make medicines from the flowers. You need to drink but the water contains pathogens that make you sick and will kill you if you can't find the flowers, to make the medicine, to cure it. There are venomous creatures that bite you and you need a different set of flowers to make the medicine for that or you die. You can make planters to grow your own food and flowers but it takes a while for you to get the resources to make them, and then takes a while for them to grow what you need. So there is a very good chance that you die before they deliver anything. To make a lot of the essential items in the game you need crystals, easy enough to find at first, but they don't seem to grow back so you need to move farther away from your base to find what you need. The further you move from your arrival point the more hazards you encounter. Which means more chances to die. There is a device on your wrist that uses your spiritual energy to do things like extract crystals from their deposits, light fires, collect meat from the animals you kill. If your spirit energy gets too low then none of that works. So you need to go one of the special domes around the island to meditate and recharge your spirit energy. The number of times I have been about to die from hunger AND pathogen poisoning but I can't find flowers or food because my spirit energy is too low (yes you need spirit energy to find those too) and I have to find a meditation shelter and die meditating trying to get my spirit energy up is way to often. Overall the game experience is you stumble around figuring out what to do, and die because you haven't figured it out fast enough. Try again and die again, rinse and repeat. After the 10th death it becomes harder and harder to be interested in playing it after you die, again. I save the game often when I play, but that is of limited help. Mostly you fail because of something you didn't do right at the start so you delete everything you have saved and start from the beginning again. The dev has done a lot of great work with this game, and it's a real shame to QOL is so out of balance that it is not enjoyable to play.

The most frustrating game ever. Impossible to survive. Run run run, find food then water then bam your poisoned. Then scour the island for a flower that spawns once a week. I give up. DONE!!!!

I'm incredibly annoyed and aggravated by this game, I regret buying it. On the surface it looks like a well done polished game, but there are so many stupid decisions I ended up rage quitting and just installing mods. Poisoning, malnourishment, and pathogens are too common, too harsh, and the their cures are obnoxiously difficult to find. Seriously if you don't eat enough of a certain type of food you'll be forced to spend way too much effort to correct it. First getting that food you need. then searching for two specific rare herbs to "cure" your malnourishment, then either recrafting a fire and cooking pot or getting back to your base to make the potion before dying. Because the game doesn't have an autosave or history you can lose entire playthroughs if you save at the wrong time. Spirit is a nice idea, terrible execution. It's an annoyance, not a feature, having to find a geodome pod to stop at ruins immersion. Why not have spots at scenic locations or at your campfire, spots that would actually be relaxing to go to. The menu is clunky and unintuitive. A hundred games have effective inventory and building menus, Retreat To Enen is terrible. When building snapping and rotation are slow and finicky. Attacking things with a spear is awful and unwieldy.

Game has a lot of good and bad qualities. Graphics are great. Game controls are not bad. But that is about all the good I can say about it. There is no compass, no coordinates. Just a map with not interaction with it. You get zero to no help or info. Perma Death while you sleep. It is just a QOL nightmare. You can also forget getting help on Discord and or Steam Discussions. So you are basically on your own. Good luck to you if you play this one. Needs more time in the oven.

I really wanted to give this a great go but the motion of the game play made me nauseous.

Ich verstehe die Kritik hier genau so wenig wie manch andere Spieler: Das Spiel läuft flüssig, die Grafik ist wirklich ok, es funktioniert nahezu alles recht souverän, ja es ist eben doch ein Survivalspiel, aber eben kein Dark Souls Ding. Ich finde es trotz dem relativ friedlichen Setting recht anspruchsvoll, man muss regelmäßig jagen, muss sich um regelmäßige Wasserzufuhr kümmern, auch auf die Ernährung muss man achten, dh. zu wenig Fett und man ist trotz voller Hungeranzeige unterernährt. Man muss Ressourcen sammeln und schon recht früh im Spiel wird klar, dass man ohne eine möglichst frühe Grundausstattung wie Kocher, Wasseraufbereiter usw. schnell stirbt. Auch sollte man nachts an einem warmen Feuer sitzen, und aufpassen dass man sich in der Dunkelheit nicht verirrt. Ich für meinen Teil genieße es zwischendurch mal mit den ganzen Zombieraidspielen und ständiger Bedrohung mich auch mal nur ums Überleben zu kümmern, ich mag diese Entschleunigung sehr. Wenn das jemandem zu öde ist, ist das aber kein Grund, das Spiel so runter zu raten, weil es echt gut ist, besser läuft als die meisten Spiele die ich kenne, und absolut hält was es verspricht. Man kann stundenlang Base bauen oder die Story vorantreiben. Das kann jeder selber entscheiden. Ein bisschen verwirrt bin ich über die Karte, irgendwie scheinen die Orte nicht wirklich zusammenzupassen mit der Insel, und markante Punkte sind meiner Meinung nach schwer auszumachen. Gut der Wasserfall, aber alles was weiter weg ist, sieht irgendwie gleich aus oder ist auf der Karte nicht so eingezeichnet, dass man zu 100% sagen kann, ich bin jetzt hier. Ansonsten gefällt es mir sehr gut, ich habe lange und viel Ark im Singleplayer gespielt und andere Survivalgames, und Ark war teilweise katastrophal mit Bugs und dem Spielfluss xD

Load of QOL missing, Product is still in development (building like green house has no description how it works, you build it, it dose not clear the land inside, and if you want to move, rebuild you lose 50% of mats)

I put around 10 hours into this game. It starts off really fun. Gathering and crafting are great. But then it feels like things become harder and harder to find. Malnutrition is what kept killing me. Apparently antiseptic cures this. Why? Wouldn't be so annoying had the devs added more of the flowers that craft the antiseptic. But no, I kept dying and reverting back to a previous save that inevitably leads me to malnutrition, and death.

As a survival game, it looks easy; however, the start is far from it. Those YouTubers who recorded themselves starting were not wrong. Build one thing, get sick die, build another thing, get bitten die, and consume a pathogen that can not find plants, then die. OMG, my daughter thinks it's hilarious. I died so much. The graphics are stunning. It is annoyingly addictive so I highly recommend

Worth a try, give it a fair chance. If you enjoy playing survival games on creative/peaceful mode, Retreat to Enen might be for you. There is no real tutorial so my first few hours in this game were absolutely frustrating and it was tempting to rage quit. But, instead, I looked around online and found the Discord server which had plenty of new player tips and other players who answered my questions. I started a fresh new game and had a much better experience. You spawn in on an island and are tasked with finding ruins in order to level up, the map is vague and doesn't show you where you so it is all kind of a puzzle while observing your surroundings. The build system is sandbox with plenty of options to build your dream base. Once you get established with a home camp and stockpile some resources, the game is pretty easy. The most important thing in this game is save save SAVE your progress, save multiple points. Death is permanent in this game, you don't respawn, so having save points is the key for all those moments when you need to undo, redo, rethink, re plan.