Solo dev says he's bucking against the survival 'formula' that makes them stale, and if you want to actually make an axe from scratch does he have the game for you

I think I've started multiple news articles during my career at PCG with some variant of 'I'm not really a survival game guy.' Does that mean I'm not going to start this one the same way? No, it just means I've gotten really good at it.

I'm not really a survival game guy, and there are multiple reasons for that. First and foremost: I find it difficult enough to survive in real life without the stress of keeping some kind of digital homunculus going too. But also, I find them all a bit samey. You start out on an island, probably nude, and have to punch trees and rocks until the dialectic of quantity and quality tips over and lets you do the industrial revolution. This takes approximately 400 hours.

Sergei Bezborodko, solo dev behind The Last Plague: Blight, agrees with me. «I feel like a lot of the survival games coming out these days follow a fairly specific formula that has shown to have success time and time again,» he says. «Things like crafting, inventory management, base building, hunger and/or thirst management, etc, seem fairly similar in a lot of games.»

Bezborodko is trying to avoid that in The Last Plague «I tried to be very conscious of these commonly seen elements in the genre and avoid them in my game,» he says. «For the elements I can't avoid, I've tried to at least change them up to be a bit different.» That means no «simplistic» crafting, no «generic» resources, and no zombies. It also means, for better or worse, crafting that's as laborious as it is in real life. «For example, being able to make bronze blades or objects requires you to make a mold first and then pour molten bronze into the molds to make the desired item, rather than just clicking something to convert bronze ore into an axe.»

Which is the kind of thing that either has you slavering like a sicko or running for the hills, depending on inclination. For me, I confess that adding more steps to the process of crafting isn't the kind of thing that appeals, but there were elements of The