With the push a button, your squad of three can split up, allowing you to move each character individually.
This becomes crucial when you’re setting up an ambush. If you’re close to getting seen, you can hide at any cover point, such as a tree or a wall, and enemies won’t see even if they walk right next to you. You can alternate between walking with a flashlight, which lets you see further but also draws more attention, and sneaking, which keeps you hidden but opens the door for you to bump into things. Though it feels simple and intuitive, the stealth gameplay feels far more versatile than what you’d expect from an RPG. Your squad of up to three characters roams large swaths of old ruins, searching for scrap to trade and keeping an eye out for anything that might want to fight. The world is broken up into large areas (in any other game I’d call them zones). You spend most of Mutant Year Zero exploring various portions of “the zone,” figuring out how to sneak past groups of enemies, or sneaking around to get the jump on them. I would have loved to know more about the mutants and seen more characters like them, but what’s there was enough to keep me in sync with the story the whole way through. Your interesting characters like Dux, the smart-aleck half-man, half-Mallard and Farrow, a tough half-woman half-fox with a British accent drew me in even with limited speaking time and only a broad backstory to flesh them out. There is a kernel of interesting storytelling and design in your squad, the Mutants. I haven’t spent any time with the original pen-and-paper game, so I can’t speak to whether or not it’s successful as an act of fan service, but Road to Eden’s repetitive overgrown scrapyards, cannibal marauders and rogue robots feel like a fairly bland version of the Mutant mythos relative to what fans have been imagining for years.
It’s a grab bag of society crumbling clichés. That story, sadly, never feels vital, even when it becomes tied to your squad’s own mission. I would have loved to know more about the mutants.ĭon’t get me wrong: There’s a ton of world-building - exposition extolled through in-game dialogue and non-animated cutscenes, text, and audio diaries strewn about the world - but it mostly helps advance Mutant Year Zero’s Horizon: Zero Dawn-style unraveling of how humanity destroyed itself. Despite the fact that it pulls from a world with plenty of source material - Mutant Year Zero, the RPG, is a prequel to the long-running Mutant franchise - Road to Eden does not do much with its aesthetically interesting world. You control a squad of mutant stalkers - modified humans with special powers who are tough enough to scavenge “the zone,” as it’s called, for supplies to support a settlement of human survivors called the Ark.
Adapted from a 2014 Swedish pen-and-paper RPG, Mutant Year Zero puts you into an interesting, albeit cliché, post-apocalypse where most of humanity has died, and the world has become a gigantic ruin.
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