Freaky friends
Other Deviations include a gun-wielding llama toy, a frosty jellyfish and the skull of a dog.
Homes from hell
I just don’t get the fantasy Once Human is selling here. Fight anomalies, survive in the wilderness, team up with other players to raid massive labs filled with cosmic nightmares, and then spend 20 hours building “a townhouse with a patio, kitchen, garage”, to quote the Steam page. Sure, you can construct something less generic, but why? The answer is simple: Once Human is a survival game, and survival games need to let you build bases. Even if it doesn’t remotely fit the themes of the game.
Clock in
Once Human’s setup is similarly perfect for a survival game, just not the kind of survival game it’s trying to be. The weird friction at the heart of the more typical crafty, base-building model is that these games very quickly give up the survival conceit. Once you’ve found some locations where you know you can get lots of resources, and you’ve got a little factory up and running, you’re no longer just surviving; you’re working. Thus, survival games cease to be journeys full of challenges and risks and difficult decisions, instead transforming into rote jobs. And surely, if the post-apocalypse can give us anything, it’s some time off work.
