Developer: Screwfly Studios
Publisher: Screwfly Studios
Rrp: £6.99
Released: 6th September 2013
Available on Steam, Gog.com and their own site
Played using: Mouse and Keyboard
Zafehouse: Diaries is one of those games that can’t just be placed into a neat cubby hole. If you really wanted to try and put it in a genre I would call it a survival game, but not of the Rust variety. In this game you’ll be wearing quite a few hats juggling resource management, planning, problem solving and managing the relationships between your survivors.
At the title screen you are given a choice of game types that you can play, those being; easy, medium, and hard. The interesting thing about this is that the choice of your difficulty also dictates what mission you get to play. Easy will always be ‘No Survivers’, medium is always ‘Road Kill’ and hard is always ‘Deadline’. That might sound boring but these missions only set the conditions you need to meet to win, it’s from here that things get interesting.
When you start a new game of any type a new diary is started, and after each turn any events that have occurred or decisions you’ve made are entered into the diary. Once you start a game the diary begins and it’s up to you what your survivors will do by selecting a number of options on the map screen (found to the left of the diary).
After you’ve set your survivors to their tasks (making sure to try and utilise their skills and abilities to the fullest) you’ll need to end your turn and progress the game forward by one hour by going back to the diary and clicking the watch in the corner. An hour passes and the diary fills in what happened, now this isn’t just flavour text, all the writing that appears will give you clues to what’s going on and what you need to do next as well as information about your survivors and their needs.
Oh yes, I did say the survivors have needs and wants, they even have relationships between each other. One survivor may not like another, in fact this is extremely likely. What happens if two (or more) people don’t like each other and are forced into a desperate situation? Yeah… Nothing good. So you need to try and manage them, keep them calm, healthy, rested and not at each other’s throats. Easier said than done.
You also should take into account your individual survivors occupation when selecting a task for them. I mean who’s going to heal your injured characters better? The trained surgeon or the cleaner?
If you send someone out to investigate, breach or assault a location you have to choose what they take with them, weapons, food, ammo, etc. Of course, they only have a limited weight capacity, so they can’t take everything with them and certain items are much more helpful than others.
You can also choose to read a previous diary, what this means is that once you’ve finished a game, win or lose, you can read the events of that game. Of course you have to choose to export the game to do so. This also means you can download and import other people’s diaries to see what happened to their group of survivors. I have to say I’ve never seen a feature like this is a game before and it’s something I hope that catches on.
It comes with a custom content manager too, allowing you to create items, locations, occupations and characters. Yes, that’s right you can if you so wish include yourself, your friends and your homes in your games. But because all the maps and characters are randomised from the collection there’s no guarantee you’ll get your dream team of friends. Still, it’s quite entertaining starting up a game and seeing a familiar face on screen as one of your survivors.
This has been one of the hardest games I’ve had to review, in fact I’ve been putting it off for months, not because I didn’t like it or anything like that but because it’s just a very hard one do. Personally I like the game, but I can see why many wouldn’t, it’s got little to no graphics, tons of reading and every decision you make is a risk. The good thing is if you go to Screwfly Studios’s own site and download a free demo and see if you like it.
If you liked that then perhaps try;
Papers Please
Primordia
