This game is exactly what I needed today, a peaceful and entertaining story about you and a dog rolling down a river, but it’s all just fun and games until you realize that this wasn’t as easy going as you thought.

You start out with you and your dog stuck on a raft cruising down this river in the early morning, the birds begin to sing and this country music fades in, it’s all cool as you visit different places on your great journey, stopping by a little campsite and pick up some supplies, filling up your jar and cleansing the water to drink it, trapping some rabbits for some food, making yourself some cute little mittens from the fur.

Everything is okay in the world, I’m starting to drift off into my own thoughts, thinking about stuff like “Girls” and whether or not the “Continuum Hypothesis” is viable or if we will ever create an axiom that contradicts itself or how vastly, no insanely large “Aleph Null” is or even “Aleph One” is, you know just normal teenage boy stuff.

Before you know it though, your food and water bars begin to slowly get worse and worse, and your supplies dwindle with each raid for food, you find more often than not a wild boar or the big bad wolf will drive you out of the land and hopping onto your raft again in search of a safer spot.

You begin to adapt, you craft warm clothing to survive the rain, you make a little pouch out of rabbit skin to store more food, you collect a second jar to keep larger supply of water on you and you craft a huge trip wire linked to a set of spears that impale that poor boar that followed you into your trap.

Now you have a hat made out of his skin, but now you have other problems, you keep smashing your raft up as the river begins to become a harsh and hostile environment full of rapids and debris from the flood, you smash up your sides and lose a few planks of wood.

You find a little dock and pull out your crude looking hammer and begin to repair your poor raft, you implement a rudder and some reinforced steel to the top of it to keep it sturdy, you build a little shelter on top of it, you won’t let this river control you, it used to sweep you away wherever it wanted majority of the time but you know you are better than that.

However the wilderness never forgets, next thing you know you step in some poison ivy and while you are searching through your backpack for supplies to fix your little issue a boar comes up from behind you and rams into you, your head hurts and the world is spinning around you, you eat too many berry’s and things go horribly wrong, next thing you know you’re smashing into rocks and starving out on that river, everything goes fuzzy and you fade to black as your dog comforts you in your last moments of life.

Wow, I really got carried away there, seriously though there is so much to experience in this game, it’s just beautiful even down to the sounds of the nature and the sunsets while you paddle along from settlement to settlement.

It has a cool soundtrack to it that will have you wishing you knew the lyrics so you could sing along or have a good singing ability in the first place, the crafting system is different and actually unique and as you move down the river it changes and you visit heaps of different areas.

Sometimes you will encounter a big bad wolf that will chase you making you run for your life, and your dog is the cutest thing ever, I don’t think he grasps that daffodils are not something I need to survive out in the wilderness as he jumps and barks at them.

One time I had a wolf chasing me while I was looting a house and he jumped up to try and eat me and I side stepped him like nothing and stuck a trap right in front of the porch, I laughed so hard as he glared at me knowing he would be impaled on spears and spit roasted if he tried to attack me, I even have a screenshot of it, it’s hilarious.

I had a fun play through but a snake got me in the end, turns out making tea out of daffodils would of actually removed the effect of the venom (How does that work?), but I ended up getting run over by a boar while I was limping around with my snake bite and I had no bandages so I sat in the rain staring at a camp fire before I died.

I would seriously recommend this game, a controller is a need though I could not imagine how painful a keyboard and mouse would be, the graphics are unique and I never found a single bug in the gameplay, the audio was excellent even down to the wilderness and the rain and thunder, maybe invite over your imaginary girlfriend and take turns seeing how far down the river you can each get before starving or being turned into a wolfs dinner.

8/10

About The Author

Liam Bryan

Liam loves any form of video games, long walks on the beach, bad cliche profile quotes, his family and cooking meth, he is also an aspiring game artist and a jedi knight, not to mention he enjoys talking about himself in third person a little too much