Game is promising but fundamentally broken
Interesting premise and atmospheric world, but falls apart with progression-breaking bugs and terrible quest design that make it impossible to enjoy without becoming a full-time researcher. Genuinely enjoyed exploring the world until the quests that rolled out with each update ruined that experience.
Progression-Blocking Bugs
- After completing a quest, apparently there is a drop pod that contains an item required for further progression. This can fail to spawn entirely and you don't even know it
- Game doesn't warn you when rewards don't drop, leaving players unable to progress
- Requires reloading saves, Q&A sessions on discussion forum or hoping capsules eventually spawn
Hidden Quest Chains
- No indication where missions are located
- Points of interest are kilometres apart and you are stuck on the same painfully slow boat and there is constant grind of farming for fuel or sitting around doing nothing for 20 minutes to fill up oil
Opaque Systems
- Human creation system is poorly displayed, no indication that tracker is important to guarantee what you require. You have to go to discussion forums
- You can potentially burn away items essential for progression because you don't know any better and not even realise you just soft locked your future self.
No Onboarding
- Too many progression steps require consulting Steam forums, guides due to bugs and total lack of explanation in the game
- Player is expected to piece together quest flow from community fragments rather than in-game instruction
In game vehicles are either entirely useless or punishing to use. Gyrocopter will be required to fly in tight space with a mistake causing total failure and if you don't save game before attempting (which you might not have any idea of the danger with this), then you are soft locked unless you find enough resources to build 300 steps. And you have to build steps because you can't build ladders for some reason?
The combat is essentially pointless. You can tank damage from bugged out roller balls, just stand there and shoot until they explode, and the octopus corruption things are just annoying and extremely repetitive after a while because that is all you will ever encounter.
Might have plenty of hours, but 90% of this is recycling items over and over, clearing out the same threatless enemy types that can only kill you if you want them to, and travelling back and forth minutes at a time between the same points of interest. After a while you feel like the devs are actively working to try and make you hate the game. And I haven't even mentioned the endless number of crashes that get you desperately needing to save every 5 minutes or you have to repeat a ton of grunt work over and over, or even the weather system that at times feels like endless storms reducing visibility to almost nothing or having to wait out exploration for sunlight to not have to deal with swarms of worms.
This game is called The Last Caretaker, and it feels like you are just some unpaid janitor cleaning up junk and no thanks for the effort except so say you missed a spot so you have to do it all over again
