I Am Future - Scattered Cozy Apocalypse
I Am Future is a cosy post-apocalyptic survival game from the developers Mandragora and published by Tiny Build. It is a fun game that isn’t entirely sure what it wants to be exactly, and by trying to accommodate a wide variety of playstyles, it ends up diluting everything to a certain degree. It is a good game with lots of little annoyances, but these little annoyances build up. This colours the players’ overall experience, so they are left feeling unsatisfied despite probably enjoying the majority of the content.
On a rooftop cafe in the city of Cosmopolosis, an amnesiac person emerges from a cryo-chamber. Unable to remember who or where they are, they receive help from a fridge named Earl. Earl’s consciousness was integrated into the fridge, something that happened in Cosmopolosis often. Turns out the world ended while the player was asleep requiring them to now figure out how to survive but with Earl around, it shouldn’t take too long.
When night falls, the Electrosites that helped end the world come out of hiding and will eat any plants in the area. Once they’ve finished eating a plant, or are left alone until daylight, they will turn into a weed. These weeds will eventually grow pods that damage the player. Food is already a necessary resource, so having something that destroys that resource can increase stress. Some players might not enjoy that though and it can be controlled through the coziness meter. Set to maximum, the Electrosites don’t eat plants in garden beds and the player doesn’t lose health from their Satiety meter being zero. It’s great that the game lets players decide the difficulty of the survival mechanics. Unfortunately, the other mechanics don’t really have that option and there are many of them in the game.
There is fishing, farming, cooking, crafting both tools and structures, base building, resource gathering, deconstructing items for resources, avatar customisation, exploring for resources, relationship meters, minigames and automation. That’s a whopping thirteen different mechanics squeezed into this one game. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but it feels like in their eagerness to create a wide variety of mechanics, they haven’t given any one mechanic the love it deserves. Before explaining the mechanics that feel half-hearted, let’s look at what Mandragora do right. Deconstructing existing structures is fun. Aside from the drill tool, which can overheat, it truly is relaxing to see each layer of item be stripped away and appear into the inventory. Unless it’s a large resource as they need to be transported by hand which is unique to I Am Future. Taking it to another level is
the mechanic that allows the player to deconstruct small electrical items. It’s almost a simulator where players need to take apart the items instead of putting it together. I found these sections enjoyable but with only a variety of five items to take apart, it’s a little limited. Another section of the game I wish they had more of is the exploration dioramas. There are only two. The exploration sections are designed to let the player explore the area around the rooftop via a drone. In the diorama ones, the drone navigates the stage, solving simple puzzles and picking up bits of lore that may not be found elsewhere. These were interesting and made the static image plus text dialogue sections that permeated the rest of the surroundings boring in comparison. It didn’t help that it took ages to load on my PC, being the only one of two loading screens present in the game. The game ran incredibly smoothly so I didn’t find the initial loading screen much of a bother. Unlike the drone one.
The other mechanics in the game aren’t bad per se, they’re just hollow. The cooking mechanic requires players to throw items together to find what works and what doesn’t. I was constantly discovering strange substances when trying to figure out what was edible. It was fine once a recipe was discovered, and it was great that discovering the recipe didn’t use the ingredients as it does in many other games. However, trying to discover the recipes can be a pain. I threw together bread, cheese and tomato hoping it’d make a sandwich. Nope, doesn’t exist in this variation of Earth. I just want to say this is a minor complaint and most of my complaints about the game are minor indeed, it’s just there’s a lot of them. Another example is fishing. The time of day or the weather doesn’t affect the variety of fish available, instead, it’s decided by bait, rod and chance. This isn’t an issue but what did annoy me was that on the controller, the A button was used to select the bait while X was used to start fishing. When catching the fish though, the A button is used to initiate the catch and in the minigame. Having to swap to the X to start fishing is annoying when everything else uses A.
Another minor complaint is that the automation element doesn’t go far enough. Players can build minions that can help with gathering resources, building structures, watering plants and repairing defence structures. These are almost perfect but each one has a minor problem. The gatherers put items in any chest, meaning the systems the player might have in place are messed up. I often had to reorganise my storage because the minion had placed the same item in multiple chests in small numbers. Building structures was great, except if you were upgrading a structure, the minion was no use at all. They only help with the initial building as the hologram allows resources to be placed and kept in the hologram, but if the player was upgrading a structure, they had to have all the required resources on hand before attempting to upgrade. The watering ones were fine except they wouldn’t harvest the items, requiring the player to keep coming back to harvest and replant seeds.
It was the same with the engineer. They repaired structures and kept the generators fueled up, except the player had to make sure there were fuel and repair kits in the chest, or just fuel the generators themselves. To me, it felt like the minions didn’t quite finish the job on all their jobs. The relationship section of the game felt like it was shoehorned in, with minigames made to support it but luckily aside from getting the sentient appliances to the first level of friendship, it’s no longer required to progress. Decorative base building and character customisation are optional. The customisation only extends to the player’s hair, clothes and face accessories though.
Despite my harshness on I Am Future, I did enjoy a lot of my time with the game. I found just stripping large items like couches and robots so much fun. Tinkering with the smaller items to find small treasures inside was joyful. If I were to describe how the game feels to me, it would be “death by a thousand paper cuts”. Each of the things wrong with the game is a very minor annoyance in what is a good game, but it’s enough to make the player come away feeling disappointed and like it wasn’t worth their time. It’s hard to think about the future when you are regretting your past.
I Am Future was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
