Desolate

Desolate drops you onto Granichny Island, a grey, post-Soviet-flavored landmass that has clearly seen better days. You play as a Volunteer, hired by a shady research outfit to figure out what went catastrophically wrong on this chunk of coastline. The setup is thin on cutscenes but thick on environmental storytelling: scattered notes, broken equipment, and the occasional mutant that very much does not want you reading those notes. It sits in a crowded corner of the market alongside early DayZ-style survival games, but leans harder into RPG progression and light narrative than pure sandbox survival. The core loop is loot, craft, level up, push deeper into hostile zones. Your character builds through a skill tree that covers combat specializations, crafting efficiency, and stamina management, and there is just enough branch variety that two players on the same server can feel meaningfully different. A gunslinger build that specs into ranged damage and steady aim plays pretty differently from someone stacking melee and fortitude, at least through the mid-game. The weapons themselves are functional rather than exciting: pistols, shotguns, rifles, and improvised melee tools. Nothing here will make you forget the armory in a dedicated shooter, but the resource scarcity keeps each cartridge feeling consequential, which is exactly the tension the genre needs. Co-op with a full four-person squad is where the game finds its best rhythm. Splitting up to cover more ground, calling out enemy positions, and dragging a downed teammate back to a campfire has a genuine low-fi camaraderie to it. Solo, the experience is grimmer, slower, and more punishing in ways that are sometimes atmospheric and sometimes just frustrating. The AI enemies are not sophisticated, and the horror elements rely more on fog, audio design, and jump scares than on genuinely unpredictable threat behavior. Fans of systemic horror (think SOMA or Alien Isolation) will find the scares fairly rote. Fans of survival grind will feel more at home. The writing is where I have to be honest with you: it is not good. The lore notes scattered across the world gesture at an interesting conspiracy, and the island itself has a coherent, bleak identity, but the actual prose and localization are rough enough to break immersion when you stop to read them carefully. If you come here expecting the narrative payoff of a proper RPG, you will leave disappointed. If you treat the story as backdrop dressing for a co-op survival session, it works fine. The progression systems are decent enough to hold up through twenty or thirty hours, though the endgame zones start to feel like the same tile sets reshuffled, and the quest design leans heavily on fetch structures that I find hard to defend. The Mixed review score on Steam (67% positive across a substantial review pool) tracks with my read: this is a game that found a loyal niche audience who ran with the co-op survival loop, and a roughly equal group who bounced off the jank, sparse story, and inconsistent performance. It launched in Early Access and left it, which means the current build is more stable than its roughest days, but it is never going to feel polished. If your group is hunting for a cheap co-op survival game with some RPG texture and a creepy atmosphere, Desolate delivers a passable weekend. If you are coming in solo expecting a story-driven RPG, adjust those expectations before you start.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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