NUTS

I spend most of my time in games that respect a 200-hour ceiling, so sitting down with a five-hour walking sim felt like a palate cleanser I did not expect to think about for days afterward. NUTS drops you into Melmoth Forest as a low-rung field researcher, alone in a caravan with a GPS, a handful of tripod-mounted video cameras, and a boss named Nina who communicates by telephone. The loop is deceptively systematic: during daylight you hike out and physically plant cameras at locations where you think a squirrel might cross. At night, back in the caravan, you review the recorded footage across your monitors, fast-forwarding and rewinding until you spot the animal's path, print a frame to pin to your corkboard, and deduce where to reposition the cameras tomorrow. It is, mechanically, an incremental deduction puzzle dressed in nature-documentary clothes. What works is how tightly the puzzle design enforces its own rules. You cannot brute-force the solution by wandering the forest until you stumble on a stash. The game is structured so that skipping the camera discipline leaves you genuinely blind, meaning each successful repositioning feels earned rather than accidental. As chapters progress, the constraints sharpen: you will eventually need to track squirrels backwards through footage, catch them at specific timestamps, and manage up to three camera feeds simultaneously across your monitor bank. The escalation is modest but purposeful, and it keeps a short runtime from feeling padded. The visual design reinforces all of this practically. The two-tone, chapter-shifting colour palette is not just aesthetic posturing; the stark contrast between subject and background is what makes a tiny rodent readable at distance on a low-resolution simulated tape. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. Runtime sits somewhere between two and six hours depending on how quickly you read squirrel movement patterns, and there is essentially no replay incentive once you know the routes. The story, voiced capably through Nina's calls, builds genuine unease across its six chapters and takes a harder left turn than the cosy premise implies, involving corporate interference, ecological conspiracy, and some genuinely odd discoveries in the forest. A minority of reviewers found the ending too abrupt and open-ended, and that criticism lands. The narrative momentum accelerates in the final act faster than the pacing earns. There are also no mod tools, no difficulty options, and no alternate modes. What you see at launch is the entirety of the product. For strategy and sim-minded players who usually need a decision tree the size of a spreadsheet to stay engaged, NUTS is worth considering precisely because its deduction loop is clean and legible. Each camera placement is a hypothesis. Each night review is data collection. Each morning repositioning is iteration. That is a feedback loop any systems thinker will recognise, and it runs on a small enough map that the mental model stays tractable. It is not a game that will test your tactical ceiling, but it is one that respects the satisfaction of methodical problem-solving, and it wraps that in an atmosphere that earns the Firewatch comparisons reviewers reached for at launch. Go in knowing it is a single evening's commitment, not a campaign. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 11 ProtonDB community reports.

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