Upcoming open-world survival crafter Nested Lands is a brutal simulation of medieval life, and we got to take an early look at its closed Alpha.
In Nested Lands, players are put in the shoes of a man who wants to rebuild his life after losing his loved ones to the plague. With dreams of creating a prosperous town, he sets off by boat looking for a better place, but quickly realizes there is no running away from his harsh reality.
Will we succumb to the poor living conditions of medieval life, or will we finally achieve our dreams of prosperity? Find out in our preview for Nested Lands.
This is a preview coupled with a supplemental video gameplay. You can watch the video preview or read the full preview below:
After a brief tutorial on how to craft tools and bandages, players are tossed into Nested Land‘s open world. The game’s world is somewhat barren, with long stretches of land featuring mostly nothing aside from a bandit camp or two.
The player’s main mission is to build and expand their town, which involves the usual survival crafting gameplay loop of chopping down trees, mining rocks, collecting resources, and looting whatever you find.
Once you have a few structures down, your goal becomes to find villagers, since no town is complete without its citizens. Villagers can look for resources on their own, as well as farm crops and build structures, but also have needs like hunger and thirst, giving the player degrees of both macro and micro management.
As expected of a game in an Alpha state, Nested Lands‘ performance is a mess. There are no graphical settings whatsoever, including a lack of VSync, making the game by default run at the highest frame rate that it can, stressing your graphics card to the max.
The lack of VSync causes a great deal of screen tearing, to the point where the game is always split into three chunks on your screen. Performance is also quite bad, as it constantly stutters and throws your camera into random directions every few minutes.
The game’s lighting effects are buggy and constantly blink in and out of existence, alongside the game’s objects, which have really weird rules for when they fade in and out of view. The game is riddled with pop-in, weirdly enough, affecting objects that are both close and far away, which is a new one to experience.
Combat is also pretty disappointing, as the player simply slashes at enemies while animation-canceling attacks into a dodge. Doing that for long enough without backing into an object is the most viable way to engage with enemy groups, and even then your chances of survival are slim.
Enemies hit incredibly hard, killing the player in one to two hits while usually giving no real space for actual combat to happen, so it’s disappointing that the only viable way to fight enemies is by basically cheesing them.
Thankfully, the player can use stealth to get around the game’s painful combat system, although that comes with its own set of problems. Not only do the patrolling NPCs move in incredibly unpredictable ways, but their cones of vision are also very specific, making the stealth system equally as infuriating as combat.
The game also has a random assortment of bugs, some more entertaining than others. After roaming around the game’s open world map for almost an hour looking for a villager, the one I recruited immediately caught the plague on his way to my base.
At some point my character just stopped walking straight, forever drifting to the left whenever moving forward. It seems to be terrain dependent, with certain slopes making him drift more, but even on flat surfaces he still slides a noticeable amount to the left.
Placing an item on a chest not only enables global crafting, but also makes items not get consumed when crafting. Below you can see how I made roughly 500 meals with only two turnips.
Nested Lands has some charm to it, since getting a depressingly bleak look into medieval life with no magical or supernatural elements is quite rare, but it’s difficult to appreciate those aspects when the game is so barren, even for an Alpha test.
There really isn’t that much to Nested Lands aside from roaming around an empty open world while linearly building whatever the game tells you to. The way the game is structured doesn’t give you the sense you are building a town on your own, simply that you are following the game’s orders while going through the motions.
Even if we completely ignore the game’s technical state and look at this as a mechanical presentation, Nested Lands is still unfun to play. The developers need to seriously consider their approach towards the gameplay loop and systems found in Nested Lands before it releases, otherwise it stands no chance to set itself apart on Steam’s wide landscape of survival crafters.
Nested Lands is set to release at some point in the future for Microsoft Windows (through Steam). You can try out the game’s open for free right now.
