Organ Trail: Complete Edition -- Part 1: Suicide Mission
1And now, to round out the shenanigans I have on offer for this Halloween's festivities, I present... Organ Trail! No, not Oregon Trail, ORGAN Trail!
This is a really strange game, but basically it IS a very old-style computer game spin on the zombie apocalypse... Organ Trail is very weird. It parodies old-style edutainment games, zombies, road trips, and just about anything within reasonable grasp that might come up along the way.
Apparently originally begun as a free browser-based Flash game, Organ Trail has indeed blazed some trails straight to Steam, mobile devices, and even portables and home consoles! This is the fairly recently-launched version that touched down on PSN for PS4 and PS Vita.
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Anyway, the whole point here is to have a short, bitter, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it Halloween-(un)friendly experience, so I've opted to take on the "Suicide" difficulty. I'm sure that doesn't bode poorly for whatever saps get roped into this madness...
Speaking of whom, my party is named after some YouTube pals of mine, and I'll be saving and/or killing them them WITHOUT their advance knowledge or consent:
Unagi
youtube.com/whitekhakis
Ophie
youtube.com/overhazard
Kat
youtube.com/bakkatshow
twitter.com/thebakkat
Lombardi
youtube.com/falco18
twitter.com/brosotired88
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The premise is simple to the point of being cliche, and that's just the way we like it on the Organ Trail! Suddenly, zombies! Will you (and four unlucky friends) survive the apocalypse?!
Our story begins with a lone survivor amidst a horde of zombies, teaching us how the aim, shoot, reload, shoot some more mechanics work, but apparently we didn't have enough ammunition to hold out against the tide of the undead...
Thankfully, a kindly stranger named Clements happened to be nearby and was willing to bail us out of trouble and lead us to his station wagon, further teaching us the rest of our action-based controls work... which, it should come as no surprise, mimics the player-favorite hunting sequences from The Oregon Trail.
A short trip to Washington, D.C. shows us the rest of what we need to know about surviving in the wilds of this brave new world, which is, once again, a deliberate echo of the traveling screens from the game's original inspiration and namesake.
Unfortunately, the script had other notions in mind for kindly old Clements and every single time, he'll get a broken arm, dysentery, AND a zombie bite. Ouch!
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A huge chunk of this video is actually dedicated to highly-descriptive walls of text explaining the meaning of all our vital resources just as we're tasked with picking up a limited quantity of them before we get underway. So my option to choose "Suicidal" is already going to make things incredibly stressful... there's barely enough to pick up some of the essentials before we get underway, let alone ALL of them. This expedition is already doomed, I can tell...
I was actually pretty okay at The Oregon Trail back in elementary school, especially at the shooting part... and our little introductory section tells me that those skills have only improved with time, so I'm going to err on the side of taking a bunch of ammo, enough fuel to keep moving, and we'll just have to eat whatever I can scavenge. (We're totally doomed!)
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But it gets worse, Clements is not happy about his state and craves sweet release from a future of skin problems and brain-gobbling... but... but we only just met him... and we have his journal... and he found my friends for me exactly as advertised... and his station wagon... ... ...sniff!
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Okay, that's enough of that, let's not waste ammunition and daylight. *boom* (Headshot?! ...too soon?)
... ... ...our journey begins now.