Game:

Organ Trail (2011)

Duration: 17:18

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1

Y'know one thing that we can clearly see DOESNT' have a glitch when it comes to the advancement of time while you're doing stuff? Scavenging. So, if your food reserves have really hit the wall, make sure you bring home more than your party eats in an hour, or you'll be in serious trouble.

Of course, it's not a very tough gamble... you'd have to get pretty consistently mobbed by zombies, losing most of your scavenged goods to come out totally behind. The problem is that the conversion rate of food into anything else is pretty terrible, money doesn't hold much value, and scraps are fairly unreliable material wealth (though the exchange rate seems to fluctuate in surprising ways) as well...

The point, as ever, is that Organ Trail's overall design principle is to make sure that it pushes you from as many directions as possible and forces you to make tough choices based on scarcity all around. And then it gives you a shopping cart in your next scavenging trip and you feel like you're on top of the world (when in fact you'll burn through that or whatever resources it gains you as a byproduct all too soon) and goads you forward into further danger. Are you prepared?!

Actually, being "mostly" prepared and venturing into the unknown, only to find something ENTIRELY outside your expectations of all sorts of flavor-filled doom to be forced to swallow, only to be blindsided by something else entirely is just part of the fun!

Take for instance, a biker gang! Didn't see that coming, but it's pretty fun to do something as simple as make them all run into the back of the station wagon. (Man, that's SOME durable rear end and side crumple zones, because this is all coming with absolutely NO damage, which is a pleasant change of pace.)

And then, of course, your precious "reserves" are meaningless in the face of random disaster... a couple containers of gasoline, several boxes of bullets, several POUNDS of precious food can vanish at once... and that's not even counting the various more specific necessary ingredients for your journey that can run awry. Car parts are especially pricey and there are just enough points of failure between them that unless you're collecting redundant extra copies the whole way, one failing on you can be a particularly serious problem.

Since they'll only break down by definition as you're traveling, you'll definitely be in a bind when you need to replace one, even IF the passage of time is glitched to not make your friends starve at the same time as you roll the dice on a trade for the particular article you needed. You'll also need to get a price you can actually cover in order to barter for it, and if you're already running on fumes in most categories, this isn't going to come as much of a relief. (Why do I feel like this is merely a sign of further suffering down the line?)

I can also only assume that simply watching these preemptive death throes for our journey is probably far less engaging for viewers than I probably hoped when I started this journey... with the stated mission of getting everyone killed fairly quickly anyway... (this clearly isn't what I wanted... it's too slow and painful!)

I briefly contemplated the notion that you can apparently get them from the river by fishing, and that too is glitched to our dubious advantage, but... fishing is really, really dull... forget about it being bearable to watch while also openly exploiting an oversight in the game mechanics, I don't think my frayed nerves can handle even a good day fishing on a bad day surviving...

So then what CAN you do besides roll the dice again and see what you can scavenge up in order to increase the odds you'll have enough in multiple categories to perhaps get a favorable exchange for that stupid little item you so desperately need to get back underw-- oh look, there it is! The journey can continue!

... ... ...

The journey... can... continue... ... ... *sigh* (I am still enjoying the suffering, though. Somehow. That's... not a good sign, is it?)