Yesterday Baseline Games announced their very first title, Nira, and it looks like a lot of fun to play. The game is a fast-paced survival exploration title, and is currently available to Wishlist on Steam here. The game is coming to PC in 2020, and will definitely fill the void in your life for a procedurally generated challenging survival title. Check out the trailer for the game below and read on for more.
In Nira players will explore endless, procedurally generated worlds, gathering the resources they need to survive along the way. Much like in Minecraft, when night falls there will be terrible creatures out to hunt you down and eat you alive. To survive against the creatures of the night, players need to build some defences in order to survive, craft weapons to use to keep the hordes at bay, and even tame animals in order to have them assist in defending at night.
The gameplay loop in Nira is Explore, Build, Fight, Survive, a struggle that won’t end until the player’s character dies. With procedurally generated worlds, and an endless number of them to explore and gather resources from, there will never be a shortage of crafting materials to build a base from. I can see some players hoarding materials in one location, coming back to add to an ever-growing fort over time that will take up a huge portion of the world before the player is done.
In terms of the types of enemies players will be fighting, we’ve been told that goblins are the main antagonist. The hordes of goblins are controlled by leaders, so players won’t only need to defend against their numbers as they slam themselves into whatever walls they’ve built, they will have to venture out into the hordes to kill the leaders of these goblins and stop the hordes from coming. Not only this, but the world of Nira is a dangerous one, filled with monsters out to kill the player, as well as hazardous materials that will take players by surprise.
I’ve played my fair share of survival games, as I’m sure everyone has with the plethora of them that is available across Steam and other digital storefronts. What looks to set Nira apart from the rest of the genre is the unique visuals, which favour pixel art over the high-fidelity graphics of Days Gone, and the scale of the game’s worlds.
While pixel art is nothing new in 2019, having a series of endless procedurally generated worlds is. The core loop of survival games revolves around players gathering resources in order to stay alive, but in Nira that’s all a secondary mechanic in the game. If anything, this makes surviving in Nira a lot more difficult than it is in other survival games, where players can huddle in safety when enemies stray too close. In Nira, players will have to defend against the hordes of enemies roaming the world, hordes that could well be coming from a few worlds away.
While the game has only just been announced, I’m intrigued by the ways it seems to set itself apart, as well as the similarities between it and other similar survival games.