The Oregon Trail

I will echo what others have been saying, that this game is not worth $30. I was lucky to snag it + the DLC for $13, and even then, that's a bit steep. As a note: I am a geek for the oregon trail games. I have played the original oregon trail game, all the way through the oregon trail games produced up to 1998. The Good >The art feels pretty and immersive, and the pixels calls back to the origins of the game. I enjoy that I can actually watch my travelers walk and see their state of being portrayed in the type of walk cycle their pixel art shows. >There are some interesting historical connections and perspectives stories/perspectives of native people. Talking to people around stops provides some fun tidbits of information. The Bad >There is little variety as to what can happen on the actual oregon trail journey. Help the dragoons, talk to Little Mary (and watch her die *every* time, despite helping them along the way, giving medicine etc), talk with the gunslinger, help the musicians... I was so excited on my first run of the trail, and then on my second and third, realized ITS ALL THE SAME. There are different scenarios and challenges you can play that give you specific circumstances (the bitter winter, etc) but I see little replay value, and there is so much tedium (see below) that I just do not care to play the different scenarios. >The game is SLOW and tedious, enough to the point where it is not worth it. On the actual trail playthrough, there are the 4 main forts you go to (the final 5th fort being oregon) then there are landmarks in between those (chimney rock, soda springs etc), and in between those, there are several mini-stops between THAT (hunting, gathering berries, undisclosed landmarks to discover), and in between THAT you will run into another stop of finding a coyote on the road, a person in need, etc. With all of these stops, map selections, etc progression is dragged out....It's just tons and tons of clicking. I want to move forward more and not be jolted to a stop so much. The animations in between stops are incredibly slow and unskippable. An almost-full run of the oregon trail took me 5 hours - but then we all drowned in a river, and the save was deleted. The dragoon mini games are fun-ish on the first playthrough, and the medals you earn are helpful, but by the second run, it's boring as you know exactly what to do. >THE WAGON BREAKDOWN AND PACKING MECHANISM IS AWFUL. It is the most tedious, painful part of the game. I would mod this out if I could. It feels like every 20-30 seconds or so, your wagon breaks down, and you lose a slot in your wagon, and must repack items or use them up. This contributes to the tedium of the game mentioned above. It makes more sense to just own a ton of wheel grease (which eliminate this issue) than to buy toolboxes. You can technically buy a fancy wagon that negates this, but it is incredibly hard to actually have enough money to do so. >The struggle/survival/trade mechanisms make little sense. If hygiene is so important, why can't I bathe in a river? I can only raise hygiene with clothes, or with a barber at a fort, both of which become rare to come by. I ran out of clothes at one point. At certain places where I could trade, the amounts of things the people were asking for were outrageous - 1,000 hard tack when you typically have maybe 300 maximum at a time. 17 toolboxes when you have maybe 3 in your inventory, etc. it become impossible to get things. I can't rest where I want, and I can't hunt where I want - I feel this is unrealistic, to a degree. You must rest/hunt at places where the game allows. Certain things take way too much time for it to be realistic. By the way, if your wagon fully breaks down, and you send one person to go get help - this wastes 8 hours, and other people don't gain rest bonuses or can do other things at the same time as this (like forage or look for items). Certain options are a losing game - we need water, do we drink the water that has mosquito larvae in it? No, everyone is upset because they wanted some! Yes? Everyone is sick! Why would that make everyone SO mad and why does the water always have larvae? I really with there was a foraging minigame - in the Oregon Trail 3rd edition, you can go foraging, and must use a guidebook to discern whether the plants you have found are poison or edible. That's educational and immersive! In this game, you can eat flour, hardtack, or meat. Don't worry about scurvy, kids! >The River - This is a notoriously unforgiving mechanism across Oregon trail games - but in this game, I did everything i could to prepare for a river crossing - lined the wagon with several pelts, waited several (5+) precious days - and only increased my chances to 55%. Welp, we all drowned. Save lost. Recommendations >A 2x or 4x speed walking mechanism to speed up the animations! I want to get a play through of the trail down to 3 hours. >More realistic survival/stops - ability to bathe in rivers to increase hygiene, more attainable trade amounts, more freedom with places to hunt/rest. A foraging minigame would be great! >Much less wagon breakdown. I think this mechanism was adapted from the game's mobile version, where they probably had a toolbox micro transaction for purchase....

This is a really cool version of Oregon trail but in my personal opinion its completely ruined by not having a basic function of being able to customize your starting party. Seriously, how hard is it to just make that possible... This isn't 1985, Not giving that option to players is pure laziness. They also have 4 classes to pick from. Thats it. and you have to have 1 of each.

Four hours in and I can't finish a play through. So much wasted time with travel cut-scenes of nothingness when entering a town or fort. We've been watching the screen move by with our people and little wagon. We don't need to watch another 2 minutes of it with each check point. Worse are the unforgiving screen clicks. I can't tell you how many times (actually I can... it was 4) I've tried to collect an animal sighting and dumped all my food. Innocently click a badger and a pop up jumps up that your wagon broke and you're going to "lose your food or you could repack" and the GIGANTIC discard button is right where I'm clicking for the animal and that ends the run. No, pause or confirmation. Just 200 lbs of food on the ground. Saves don't work properly. Made it to a town. Hit save. Reloaded a couple hours later to be 2 hours back. Inventory system needs a little help too. When you are buying things in the store or trading, there's no hint as to what you have versus what you need. You have to commit it all to memory. In the store, it will tell you you have 1 item in the wagon even if you have 10. There's a ton of conversations with NPCs that are simply bloat. I don't care for some of the events like mystery solving. You can skip these things but the boons you might get are intriguing though the events bog down the progress. I'm not sure they're worth exploring. Finally, when you turn the game on, you get this screed about "first nation people" and how basically you are playing the part of the villain as part of the "invasion" of their lands. Gag-worthy virtue signaling crap. How dare you play as the genociders of the true people of earth... The hunting is fun and they added fishing too. The characters are cute though I've twice now had the option of having a white female character name America with some pretty ugly traits which is suspicious because they're supposed to be randomly generated.

I've a very mixed opinion on the game and i think most of the enjoyment I get from it has to due with the fact I grew up playing the 3 oregon trail pc games. Nostolgia is doing some heavy lifting for me here. The primary issue for this version is PACING!!! It takes like 2 minute cutscenes for EVERY place you enter and there are probably somewhere between 30-60 of them in the game... It took me 6 HOURS to finish my first game!!! It feels like 3 of that was just watching them walk into the next event... I et that they are trying to instill the sense of the arduous journey the people dealt with but their execution for it utterly failed imo... I will likely still play to test out other premade journeys but it's almost like a form of self torture just cause i miss the old games... There are also things that weren't well thought out from the menu side of things. Things like crafting bait can only be done BEFORE fishing and you can't do it after, but it requires fish to craft... and it's really easy to end up eating or selling all your fish before the next pond because there is no way to control what rations your people eat. It'd just have been really thoughtful if after you fish you could make some too. There is also some VERY weird pacing on events. Like I was leaving a major city, took like 3 steps out of it and had 3 different major bad events in succession one right after another: gunshot wound, dead ox, broken leg.... with the city still very much on the screen even for the last one. And more of a nitpick than anything, but it gets really freaking annoying that every single time you log in you have to see their heavy handed virtue signaling about how very thoughtful and considerate they are to the native american side of the story... It's ridiculously woke and over the top and if they HAD to have one it should have just been one when you first install and boot up the game, not an every time you start it up thing. It just comes off as a desperate "look at how virtuous and thoughtful we are"

I LOVE the old school Oregon Trail. I even have a version bookmarked that you can play in a browser and I played through it win or lose about every 3 months or so for the past several years. I honestly, I saw this and expected to hate it. So I didn't buy it. I waited. And waited. This summer (2026), I picked it up in the Summer Sale thinking "I'll play it immediately, and if I hate it, I'll refund it". I started with the tutorial and I hated it. I went to go refund it, but at the last page, I thought to myself, may as well play a bit longer to see if it is any better since I have up to 2 hours before I have issues refunding. So this time, I skipped the tutorial and, well, the tutorial sucks. Do NOT judge the game by that. The actual game, I quite enjoyed. to the point I played through it over the next day or two until I reached Oregon (not with a full party sadly). This game will take you longer to play through than the original. Yes, some things could be sped up to help with that if the devs were smart. But honestly, I found nothing that really detracted from the game. It's still super fun. It's still super frustrating when random bad things happen at the worst possible time. It's still likely that one of your team is going to die from dysentery. And at the end of the day, isn't that the way life is supposed to be? This is still the same basic premise people have loved for decades. You set out, you hope for the best, you encounter obstacles along the way. With some planning, and a bit of luck, at least one of your crew will make it to Oregon. Then, you get to do it all over again.

I wanted to play the original Oregon Trail text adventure game, but this was the closest game available on Steam. Upon game start up I was shown a screen stating the purpose of the new game was to pay homage to the Natives that had their land stolen in an invasion. Such blatant political subversion of American Exceptionalism only exists to vilify European Nation Building and gloss over the brutal truth that all cultures are guilty of the evils of conquest and those from the Native corner tended to be ruthlessly savage in their rape and murders. I did not make it past the start menu. I have no desire to play this anti-western propaganda. As of writing, I have requested a refund.

Congrats guys, with all that technology, extra education and skills you have, you managed to make a game even worse than the original, made decades ago. If i wanted to be brainwashed about race, gender and sterotypes id go watch a disney movie, dont put it in my games.