I think it was when I reached the 7th time of stepping outside the main camp spawning point in Project: Mist that I realised that I wasn’t having that much fun. The previous attempt had me walking confidently down the hill, crossbow in hand and ready to face off against the two humanoid figures, then from nowhere I was starting to register damage. I spun around quickly, trying to see where the attack was coming from, as there are no one screen indicators. Out of the undergrowth ran some hairless monstrosity, that I tried to swing at with my hand axe, and I missed. I then spun around again to as they attacked and swung, but their attack seemed to land just below my field of vision. The next five minutes had me doing everything from running in a circle to spinning on the spot, to constantly spamming the attack button. The attack button that triggers the swing, rather than attacks immediately, causing an issue with my timing. I didn’t have to worry. No matter what I tired to do, I couldn’t escape and I died. At that point, I pretty much decided that Project: Mist wasn’t for me.
Be difficult, be tricky, be an onslaught of continual chaos, make survival feel like it is always going to be an edge of your seat thing. But for goodness sake, make sure if one of the smallest enemies in the game comes to attack you that your attack is wide and large and swats them down. Otherwise I go into everything with a complete lack of confidence. The thing about survival games is the first encounter should be tricky, should be a simple taster of what is to come, opposed to the definite death that you definitely deserve just for deciding to step out of your camp. Project: Mist fails in that regard. Especially for a game where it forgets that punishment always has to be fun. Unforgiving is fine, as long as unforgiving knows when to sit down and give the game a chance to breath and for the progress to feel real.
There’s too much going on that the engine falls over and judders but doesn’t break. Looking around is too fast, while the ability to react seems to be too slow. I don’t know for sure if this is Steamdeck related, but overall I felt performance wasn’t optimised and game objects sometimes just popped into existence. Which is strange because often the draw distance was fairly impressive.
I don’t know. I don’t want to turn this into some kind of tear down, where I give a list of things that have been done so much better by so many other places, because this seems to be a work of passion and genuine urge to create something that people will enjoy, but in the videogame space, and especially in the PC arena where there is so much choice, so many different games I could be playing, Project: Mist seems to have been developed in a semi bubble, where obvious quality of life improvements have been ignored to be sacrificed at the alter of making this game really awkward and hard to play. To be honest I’m struggling to justify why this really should have my time over another title that wants you to play it?
I’m probably going to come back to this review and give it some more thoughts once I’ve tried again to exist in the land of Project: Mist. Time will tell. Shame.
