Organ Trail: Complete Edition (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
586A playthrough of The Men Who Wear Many Hats' 2012 zombie-themed survival adventure game for PCs running Windows, The Organ Trail: Director's Cut.
Played through the campaign mode on the normal difficulty level.
Organ Trail labels itself a "retro zombie survival game," and that's a pretty accurate description, though those of you that were in an American elementary school in the late 1980s will immediately recognize the influences at work here.
The game is a clever parody of Mecc's classic educational game, The Oregon Trail. If you don't know it, or if you haven't even thought of the game since about 1990 and would like to see it again, you can check out my video of that one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bgs9jfSo9k
I have many fond memories of going to the computer lab to play it way back in the day, as I am sure many of you do, but when Organ Trail came out, I remember thinking, "Are they serious? Who would make something like that?"
In spite of my reservations, I played it and was thoroughly impressed. It looks and feels exactly like it did back in school, only now its much more violent and adult. It's a great combo!
We still head to the pacific northwest on this adventure, but not for gold or land - no, this time a nuclear war and a zombie apocalypse have destroyed most of the United States, and your party must make their way through all sorts of harrowing dangers to reach "Safe Haven."
All of the original game's elements are intact here in one form or another - instead of a Conestoga wagon, you take a beat up station wagon or SUV across the country, and you collect scrap metal to do any necessary repairs along the way. You still go hunting for resources, though instead of shooting buffalo and squirrel, you shoot a variety of zombie types. Instead of fording the river with your wagon, you now can choose to slowly drive through the angry hordes of undead, or if you prefer the more direct approach, speed through the crowd as everyone fires their weapons.
The graphics and sound are truly impressive in the Organ Trail, too. Not from a technical aspect, of course, but they strike a surprising balance between old and new. The 16-color pixel art hilariously depicts all sorts of disaster scenes when you arrive at new locations, and the interface closely mimics the original Apple game with its big chunky font and it's high contrast color choices. The music is absolutely brilliant, too, with it's odd, heavily filtered mixture of 8-bit beeps, digital instruments, and synth pads. It sounds retro yet completely modern at the same time, and I can't think of any other game in recent years that has nailed the effect as well as it was done here.
If you ever thought the the Oregon Trail needed more radiation-zones, strip clubs, and ravenous corpses, I think you'll find that Organ Trail makes for a highly entertaining time. It's a throwback to the pre-internet days of floppy disks and green monochrome monitors, but it's also legitimately fun game, on its own, in the modern day.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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