Vintage Story is a lot of things. It’s a game about moving through the various stages of human civilised development, from caveman to king, but it’s also about building whatever you want. With that said, it’s also got some completely mad elements like anomaly storms with scary monsters to avoid, but wow does it look like an impressive game. Vintage Story is out right now for anyone to purchase and play in early access, you can find it here. Check out the game’s trailer below and read on for more details.
Become Civilised
In Vintage Story you’ll start out as a hunter and gatherer, surviving by the skin of your teeth. You need to survive long enough to learn how to pull yourself up, and eventually become smart enough to mechanise all of the processes that you’ll spend hundreds of hours doing before hand. The world is absolutely massive, with individual biomes that are all procedurally generated, and play a vital role in your time with the game. You’ll thrive in some areas, but succumb to others. It’s down to you to discover what happened to the people that came before and avoid the mistakes they made that ultimately led to their destruction.
While the world is challenging enough, there’s also a story that involves some seriously creepy lovecraftian monsters to compete with. Players advance the story in any way they choose through environmental storytelling, meaning that you can go for days without knowing what’s happening, only to stumble upon the game’s story in a hidden cave.
Craft Like Never Before
This game looks a lot like Minecraft, but it’s on a completely different level. The crafting and inventory management is way more intuitive, and it has been built with solutions to those nagging problems that everyone has with Moyang’s game. Instead of heading into menu after menu, you can open two menus in the world and drag items between them, all whilst maintaining sight of the world around you. It feels like the difference between the menu system in Oblivion and Skyrim, with so many solutions to so many problems just be re-building the whole thing from the ground up.
With the core gameplay aside, this is a powerful engine for building whatever you want. You can go thousands of blocks into the sky, stockpile items, and create an experience that’s as realistic, or not, as you want. There are accurate animal behaviours that are complex and difficult to understand, realistic beekeeping, and solutions that need to be found to storing food before it spoils.
Vintage Story is like a hardcore survival version of Minecraft’s hardcore survival mode. It presents a far harsher world, but one that you want to return to again and again, just because it’s so equally punishing and intriguing. The game’s development will continue while it’s in early access, so anyone who plays from now on will have a direct impact on the final version of the game when it launches.