![]() ![]() ![]() Or at least, it will if you’re playing alone, as I was. It’s always tempting to take the shortest route, to rush towards those objectives as countless video games have trained you to do - but Icarus is a game about preparation, and it’ll gut you for moving too fast. "I already have enough arrows to fend off the wildlife enroute to building this hunting cabin," you’ll whimper, about-to-be-dead-ingly. "I can cross the arctic with just a handful of thatch and gumption for shelter," you’ll say, idiotically. "Pfft! I don’t need iron tools just to trek out to that geo survey spot," you’ll think, wrongly. Icarus’s (esseses) main trick is to dangle those small, eminently achievable objectives in front of you, then pave the road to them with wolves and weather. In practice, every mission I’ve been on has had multi-day time limits but could be completed within an evening, so I never felt close to that mode of failure. I believe the timers keep going even when you’re not playing, which is a tad rude to anyone who can’t reliably commit to playing a certain amount within a certain period. That means you’ll be back to moving and gathering resources at the slowest possible rate, while hungering and thirsting at the fastest - along with being unable to craft anything except basic starter gear. Every mission has to be completed within a certain number of hours or your character gets stranded forever, losing access to all your unlocked blueprints and talents. You drop into a hostile environment on the alien (yet for some reason Earth-resembling) planet of Icarus, craft whatever you reckon you need to achieve an objective assigned via some bland corpo-spiel, then get out of dodge. Rather than the grand survivathon most tree chop ‘em ups subject you to, Icarus is divided into individual missions. ![]() I’ve scampered through woods, desert and snowstorms without proper preparation, before shortly and consequently succumbing to claws, teeth and tusk. I’ve died of thirst, asphyxiation, exposure and falling (well, hitting). During those 20 hours I courted, then full on snogged disaster in countless ways, from not bothering to lay down respawn-granting bedrolls, to slamming raw watermelons I knew would give me food poisoning. It helps that my Icarus playstyle is ‘hubris’. I went on to spend another 20 hours (mostly) happily within its grasp. It’s like Schrodinger's cat, except if the cat was a bear made of draining thirst meters. It’s obviously flawed, wildly frustrating and frequently janky, but it’s also somehow simultaneously good enough to have kept me playing into the early morning on multiple nights without even realizing the time. The experience was so horrible it transcended mere discomfort and turned into, on some level, genuinely enjoyable farce. As the minutes dragged on, my mind flashed back to the time I spent half an hour searching for my wireless earphones amidst gails of horizontal rain on Brighton beach, shivering and still half-soaked from a foolhardy morning swim. I desperately needed to find and reclaim my pack, stuffed with meat, tools and building supplies, which was proving difficult because your corpse just appears as a small pile of excruciatingly indiscernible brown sandbags. It was dark, and also stormy, and also there were more bears. I’d just been savaged by a bear, and had morosely jogged back over to my corpse from the respawn drop ship several miles away. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s still better than it has any right to be.Ībout five hours into Icarus, the new survival game from Day Z’s Dean Hall and co, I had a moment. When playing solo, Icarus is a largely unforgiving survival experience brimming with both jank and atmosphere. ![]()
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