Coming back around to the 7th Continent (previously), I think I’m landing on “I don’t like it.” I think it does what it sets out to do, I’m just not having much fun playing it. There are three entwined negatives for me: survival gameplay, punishing exploration, and static replayability.
Ultimately, I think the fact of the survival gameplay is going to turn me off to the game. Most games I enjoy have a foundation in building up: RPGs, RTSes, deckbuilders, all the sorts of games where you are putting together an engine and become stronger over time to meet greater challenges. There is a bit of that, and the goal is to keep yourself ahead of the curve, but it feels more like a constant stream of loss rather than a constant stream of gain, and the goal is to win before you run out of resources and chances. Instead of accumulating power and resources, you are in a race to win before you run out. I did not enjoy that aspect of gameplay.
Tied to that, the act of exploring punishes you by taking resources. It has some of that old adventure game feel: sometimes you get punished for putting your hand in the hole, sometimes you cannot advance unless you put your hand in the hole, and there is no way to tell in advance without putting your hand in the hole. Sometimes you profit, more often you get punched in the face for your trouble. That ties to the survival gameplay: keep trying things, find the path to advance before you get punched in the face too often. But since you do not know whether exploration will be required or punished this time, it creates a sense of learned helplessness. You try it, feel pleased if it goes well, shrug about the inevitability of death if not.
Which leads to the third point: players who like the game seem to like the fact that you learn these over time and playthroughs. The second time, you know not to bother with X because at best you break even. You know that you need to find Y and Z. Memorization is not a fun sort of learning. You are not learning how to play better, just which particular actions have better outcomes in fixed circumstances, and any “how” you learn is the metagame of how the developer thinks.
There are some neat things going on in 7th Continent, but I don’t think it is for me. My order included some to-be-delivered expansion content, so maybe that will change up the game in ways that will be appealing. But probably not. I think some of the reviews I had seen either embraced the survival gameplay, used an unlimited easy mode to turn it into a casual exploration game rather than survival, messed up (or intentionally changed) the rules to nullify the “punch in the face” dwindling resources, or were coming off the high of winning after X tries. Some people were really excited about going back to the first island knowing how everything worked, while for me that seems like eliminating the point of the game. It is not solving the riddle, just knowing the answer because you have heard that one before.
The 7th Continent is ambitious, but I found myself having more moments of “ugh, this” than “ooh, neat.” It is trying to capture the “choose your own adventure” and video game experience in a massive web of cards. Like the dog that plays backgammon, the amazing thing is that it works at all, not whether the dog plays well. I also played the computerized “choose your own adventure” of 80 Days recently, and had a similar reaction; at least that handled bookkeeping efficiently by using a computer, rather than giving you huge stacks of cards to work it out.
: Zubon