Starting out in Sheltered, I made my real life family. We didnât last long. Someone forgot to repair the water filter of our underground bunker; by someone, I mean me. Guess Iâm your typical forgetful father, but I didnât think about what would happen next in such a short amount of time. I watched my children get sick due to radiation, and because our home needed attention, I was unable to go out and find any food. Malnourished, sick and without any prospects, we barely made it past two weeks before I was digging a grave. I felt like a bad provider and immediately decided to invest my time in random living families from then on out.
Itâs not much, but my conservative strategy kept me and my family safe- for a while.
Sheltered is a roguelike survival game where you and your nuclear family hides out in a shelter during an atomic apocalypse. While youâre down there, youâll use supplies to build some of the necessities of life; poop buckets, makeshift showers, and sleeping bags. Thankfully, youâve hit the jackpot when it comes to locations; youâve got a hatch, two heavy doors, and an intercom system protecting you from the outside world. As the game progresses, you can add some luxuries to your setup, including painted walls, jukeboxes, and a large assortment of special items.
If you enjoyed Fallout Shelter at all, this is a game that takes all the opportunities of the successful spin-off and improves on them fully. Expeditions are experienced instead of recapped. You manage your resources instead of just assigning responsibilities. Your occupants rely on you to keep them sane, healthy and comfortable. It takes the scavenging of Minecraft, the voyeurism of The Sims and The Oregon Trailâs strategy and compresses it into a brilliant experience. While itâs not a perfect game, it does everything it sets out to do very well, and I found myself totally engrossed in keeping everyone in my imaginary family alive.
Youâll worry about desperate people attacking you, but nothingâs scarier than a peeved off bear.
Thereâs a ton of objectives that youâll have to manage as you try to make it in a world gone wrong. Youâll need your survivors to maintain the air purifiers, water filters, power generator and cleanliness of the facility. Supplies are gathered by either making trades with random bypassers, finding traders over the radio, or going out and scavenging. To venture out, youâre given a procedurally generated map that is filled with questionable locations that youâll have to visit to identify. Will it be a pharmacy filled with antibiotics or a factionâs lair filled with violent sociopaths?
Before you set out, youâll have to have enough water to make the trip. Once you lay out your course, youâll plan your loadout; one weapon, two accessories, and one bag per explorer. Youâre only allowed to bring two in a crew, but you can have multiple excursions going at once. Once your teams leave out, theyâll periodically call you to get advice on their current situation. While this can become tiresome considering youâll want to enter every location regardless of the situation, itâs not very frustrating and beats the heck out of sending them out and forgetting all about it. Plus, you can make decisions on if your crews engage enemies or avoid contact with anyone altogether.
Planning a route and exploring the various terrains is so rewarding and frightening when death is permanent.
If you do approach people, youâll find most engagements end with four options; trade, recruit, fight, flee. If you feel like youâve stumbled across a dangerous person, you can quickly flee for your life. If youâre a less than reputable sort, you could attack the person and take everything theyâve got in this shattered world. You can try to recruit them, and introduce a stranger into your midst. Of course, most of the time youâll just trade with people. If you succeed, youâll be rewarded with a boost in whatever category fits the task. Sadly, I discovered an exploit, where you can trade a can of food for a can of food, and still get the boost.
If you get into a battle, either by your choice or not, if you should fall, those characters are dead. Forever. My last family, I went past 100 days of nearly perfect survival, only to make one unfortunate call with a roaming gang of marauders; my son sadly didnât make it out of the skirmish. He was crazy good with a knife and got to be stronger than his old man. Combat plays out like a standard turn-based RPG, where you can attack, steal, subdue or defend each round, or attempt to run. Weapons range from blunt sticks, brass knuckles, automatic rifles, and even a sledgehammer if you want to go all Super Mutant.
Coming across a random vault is not only a game changer, but also a reason to keep exploring.
Meanwhile, people back in the underground home maintain the equipment, build new rooms and floors, and can even take a little leisure time by reading a book or popping some pills. The characters donât have a lot of personality and are more built on your projected sympathy. The most animation youâll get out of them is when they have some form of poisoning, and fall to their knees to upchuck. You care about their safety- you need to see everyone survive this life-threatening situation.
It appears thereâre several endgames to this bleak world as well. Thereâs an RV that sits above your shelter, with a checklist of missing parts. I got the thing all decked out, and Iâm only missing three wheels at the time Iâm writing this. However, in my journey to a far away junkyard in search of these three bouncy tires of salvation, I discovered yet another hatch. Oddly, the door features a security lock, requiring a four number combination to open. Like John Locke from Lost, I have now become obsessed with knowing whatâs inside, and I might set fire to the tires if I ever find them.
If I had one fault with the game, itâs the lack of conflict. While the game is filled with tense moments, like running into armed people on the road and having strangers knock on the door with only your kids inside, they rarely play out in dangerous ways. In my ten hours of gameplay, I only had two people attack me on the road, despite hundreds of interactions. The game advised me that roaming gangs might break into my home, so Iâd better install better doors and make hideaway walls in my facility, but those moments never came. Perhaps I was too careful- my more successful random family didnât take in outsiders or trade much from our door. While the choices you make will have you thinking about the moral implications, thereâs no response to those decisions outside of your own thoughts. Thatâs not to say the game doesnât toss you surprises- one outsider who sought sanctuary purposely sabotaged our water filter after we turned them away.
People will be so jealous of your vault, theyâll throw out video game references to scare you.
Some of the other minor faults are just small inconveniences. When youâre trading, the game shows you how much trade value an item is worth, but when youâre scavenging it shows you how many you have in stock; never telling you both crucial bits of information. I also wouldâve liked to have a Fallout 4-esque tag system, so I could easily keep track of what materials I needed to keep an eye out for. I also wasnât a huge fan of the experience system, which only rewards a chosen one of the potential two members in a group, even if both of you throw down with unruly survivors. Also, the controller isnât nearly as intuitive as a mouse would be, but the game does an excellent job of making the situation as comfortable and seamless as possible. I also wouldâve liked to see some buildable weapons, liked spiked bats and shivs, but now Iâm just nitpicking an otherwise brilliant experience that understands brevity.
I must admit, the pixel-based art style is becoming a bore for me. While I understand the claim that this kind of artwork allows the user more agency in imprinting their identity onto the model, I simply canât help but see the convenience of the argument. Sheltered wouldâve been the same game with more realistic graphics- but thatâs more time spent on visuals and less on the exceptional game design. Take that as you will, but I must say- the graphics may be simple, but their arrangement holds a nice complexity. Toss that together with a moody soundtrack, and youâve got yourself a distinct style that at least stands atop those other pixel abusers.
Overall, I canât say enough positive things about this game. Iâve played some bad strategy survival games in the past year, and Sheltered is like a breath of fresh and yet familiar air. All of its parts just worked for me, and despite the gameâs minor hiccups, thereâs enough suspense, mystery and heartache to make Sheltered an experience I would recommend to anyone looking for an engaging RPG. While it doesnât do anything revolutionary, it doesnât half-ass anything it brings to the table, and for that I tip my hat to the developers at Unicube. NOW GIVE ME THE CODE TO THE BUNKER!