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Early Access Review: Three Days (PC)

I would like to point out that I did receive a Steam Key for the press version from the developer for the purposes of reviewing this game. The game is still in development, so things may change from this review.


Many thanks to Lewis of Gore Pixel Games for providing me with the key.


I first found this game when I was having a dig around looking for games in the survival genre, and saw it involved a time limit in the main gameplay mode – this is something I haven’t often seen in a survival game – so my interest was immediately piqued.


The early access version of the game that I received had both the main game play mode and the endless mode enabled, so I had a play around with both. I have to say, the main game is far more challenging – there is a time limit of 72 hours, which from what I can gather lasts around 20 minutes of real time, from starting on the island and finding a way off, before time running out.  There is a day night cycle in the game, with survival becoming a lot more fraught at night-time, as chickens mutate and attack you,  and the temperature drops.


Playing around in the game, I found the areas fairly well detailed – it was easy enough to tell what everything was, and the backgrounds weren’t bland. Text contrasted well with the backgrounds, and was fairly easy to read.


Things like the skills screen were easy to figure out, with a fairly simple skill tree to work your way up. I would have liked a bit more in the way of skills to develop, though I guess for the main game mode, what was here sufficed as there is a time limit, although a bit more for the endless mode, to work for, would have been good. Levelling up is fairly logical, with experience gained for foraging items, harvesting food, etc.


There is a crafting system in this game, where dragging different items foraged from bushes, trees, etc, together results in an item being auto-crafted. Although this works fairly well, it got slightly annoying when different items were close together, and the wrong item ended up being crafted. Still, that’s more a problem on my side of it, than the game, not separating items properly. There seems to be a decent selection of items to craft, and a decent selection to craft. One thing I found tricky to begin with at first was creating a fire – it took me a couple of attempts before I figured it out. This was slightly annoying as a fire is crucial to crafting other items, some, such as water, which are vital for survival. Maybe if it was clearer at the outset how to make a fire? Then again, that’s kinda the point of the game I guess, figuring it out.


On the main game screen, there is an option to view the crafting menu, and see what makes what… I haven’t taken a look at it yet however, as I prefer to discover stuff for myself in this game. I can assume it’s fairly in depth a list, though, as everything else on this game seems to be.


As far as survival on this game goes, your character has three bars which have to be watched, which all impact on your health, which starts at 100. The three things to keep track of are hunger, thirst and temperature. Before I cracked how to make a fire (and from there how to purify water…) I found the thirst bar the hardest to keep under control, with it steadily trickling away over the course of the hours. Hunger was fairly simple to keep topped up, whether through eating foraged items such as berries or wheat, or through cooked meats which had been harvested from the chickens and fish that could be hunted.


Temperature seems to be fairly easy to manipulate, through increasing it by standing in the sun, or working on harvesting items, with decreasing it by standing in water, or at night. Keeping it up at night seems to be the most difficult, but I guess that’s a good reason to break rocks.


Thirst seems to be the most critical, as it apparently drops the fastest from what I can tell, but it’s easy enough to keep up once a fire’s been crafted and you’ve purified the sea water to drink.


If any of these bars drop too low, it starts slowly chipping away at your health, which upon hitting zero, results in your character’s death.  The bars also seem to have an impact on the movement speed of the character, with the lower the bars, the slower the movement speed, indicative of your character trying to conserve what they have left.


As far as story goes in this game, it’s based on the SCP Foundation – a group of writers which made up an organization developed by the government, in order to supress conspiracies or objects,  which are then kept hidden away. Although, I couldn’t find the SCP mentioned in this game on the SCP Foundation website, I’m assuming it’s one the developer made up for the game – however, it is an interesting take on the genre (and makes a change from straight fiction writing!), and it is enjoyable. I quite enjoyed tracking down all the stray pieces of paper in game, trying to figure out the story behind what had happened in game, it was fairly compelling.


The music was fairly good – although there wasn’t much variation in it, I thought it was fairly atmospheric.


Although I haven’t played much of the game yet – only a couple of hours, give or take, the game seems fairly well made, I’ve not found any bugs or glitches during playing, which is nice.


Overall, I’ll be interested to see how this game develops further, but it seems fairly solid at the moment.


Written by Karen

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