Berry Madness

My honest first reaction when I loaded Berry Madness was that I had accidentally launched a tech demo someone forgot to finish. You spawn in a field, you walk around with WASD, you press Space to jump, and you pick up berries. That is the complete loop. There are no combat mechanics, no puzzle systems, no upgrade paths, no story beats worth mentioning. The listed controls on the Steam page are literally W, A, S, D, and Spacebar. When a developer feels compelled to list jumping as a feature, that tells you everything you need to know about the content on offer. The game comes from developer Ready To Play and released in early 2023 as a first-person casual collectathon, if you want to stretch the genre label that far. The world is small, colorful in a flat sort of way, and accompanied by background music. Collectible berries are scattered across the environment in various locations, and reaching them all is the entire win condition. There are no difficulty settings, no modes, no progression system beyond the act of finding the next glowing piece of fruit. On a generous playthrough, you are looking at somewhere under thirty minutes of content. The community response on Steam tells the fuller story. The title accumulated around 27 user reviews sitting at roughly a coin-flip split between positive and negative, which for a collectathon this short is not a ringing endorsement. More pointedly, the game has since been delisted from Steam entirely, meaning third-party key sellers are the only path to ownership. Community forum posts raised concerns about pricing practices around launch, and the lack of any post-release updates or content additions means whatever you see is whatever you get. No patches, no new areas, no reason to return after your single run. If there is one thing Berry Madness does competently, it is that the basic locomotion feels functional. You will not fight the controls. The environment does not break. For an absolute beginner who has never played a video game and wants the gentlest possible on-ramp to first-person movement, there is a non-zero argument here. For anyone else, including fans of actual walking sims with atmosphere, narrative, or even modest exploration depth, titles like Firewatch or Proteus exist at comparable or lower price points and offer something resembling a complete experience. Bottom line: this is a curiosity at best and a cautionary tale about key-seller pricing at worst. The game works, in the same sense that a car with no seats technically starts. Approach with maximum price sensitivity and zero expectation of depth.

Alex · Scout Team

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