NEO Scavenger

Amazing game, I'd recommend it 100%

Someone just said "What if I made a game that's only inventory management" and I had an absolute blast with it. Dan Fedor is also a very sympathetic dude and I can't wait to see other games he comes up with after this and ostranauts.

The only thing this game lacks is long term motivation after a >certain point<... If you basically cleared a lot of the map and killed a lot of enemies (not sure what the condition is) you attain a "Legendary" status and your character gets a lot of "Luck" added to all his RNG rolls which makes you nearly unkillable, I think it's a fun touch though since the game is basically based around "what if all myths suddenly became true" or something like that (I'm honestly not sure about the full story). So in a way it makes sense if you become really legendary
Another flaw was how there are some areas in the game where picking the wrong options in dialogues will straight up murder you, so understandably people get salty about this especially after long runs. Don't get attached to your current runs

I wore the strangler's hood. 10/10

Neo Scavenger,
I really really enjoy video games like this and I don't even know why. Is it the indie development that takes risks on something different? Is it the post apocalyptic setting? Is it the the depth of the game mechanics? Is it the survival aspect? Is it the procedural generation that allows each play to differ?

I think it's a little bit of every reason that makes this game a gem. I wish we had DLC for games like this. I wish we had more games like this. I wish for a Neo Scavenger 2 aka sequel. If you liked Stalker GAMMA mod or are into games like Fallout than this is a must play.

Being a homeless cannibal never felt so good.

Excellent game. Meaningful character creation, crafting system, sense of exploration/adventure. You will improve greatly as you learn the fundamentals.

great game!

So many overlapping systems that lead to all sorts of interesting times. You will try and fail at using plastic bags and rags as your clothing. You will make a bindle. You will get into the most realistic, dirty, gritty combat ever.
The only thing I would say is it’s a shame there is SO much to discover but it’s a harsh permadeath game so finding all the cool things/places/etc is quite hard.
Never will a game make you so happy to find pants. Or MATCHING shoes. Or a non-disease ridden bandage. But MAN does it feel nice when you find that rifle, medical-kit, or a life-time supply of duct-tape.
Quite a neat game but it’s not easy or fair. Not for the easily frustrated.

excellent game

It's a decently made survival game set in a post-apocalyptic Michigan wasteland, I would quite say it's a text-based adventure game with excellent illustrations to accompany the plot and gameplay. Waking up from cryogenics facility after decades of strife, you set out to survive in the wilderness of Michigan, defend yourself from cannibalistic bandits or make a profit in the last vestiges of civilization that is the Detroit Megacity. You can choose to be a primitive Ted Kacyznski wannabe living in peace with nature, or sacrifice your freedom for the comforts of the Sprawl. Either way, dangers lurk in the form of supernatural creatures, infected cultists and desperate looters seeking their fortunes. Can you survive the post-apocalyptic Michigan, walking hexes after hexes to safety of civilization and maybe discover who you truly are? (You got amnesia, brother, deal with it.)

Honestly, I'm ready to sell my soul for a full on game like this...

Never take off that tallisman unless you know what to do

1.) Wake Up
2.) Throw Hands With Werewolf
3.) Skin Him And Wear Him
4.) Fall Through Abandoned House Flooring
5.) Attract The Blue Man Group
6.) Contract Illness And Die
Cinema

I really didn't care much for this flash-based game, and it was very unforgiving. Their next game Ostranauts is much more enjoyable while still having survival elements.

very good

Fun novel game that is a tile based procerudurally generated Day-Z/Zomboid esq. game. Very fun trying to figure out how to do things with logic.

Too flawed, balance is fucking awful, worth around a dollar not full price.

I love games where you can die right after leaving the spawn area. Yes there's a lot of luck involved but getting out of the beginner slump is fun, and discovering new things is satisfying, I still haven't gotten too far into the game but I am loving it.

fun game

great game. more complex than one would think.

I beat a man half to death for his shoes, decided to show him mercy and let him live. He came back with a friend, a wrench and a lesson.

Mercy to your enemies is cruelty to yourself.

this is michigan in 2026

if you like post-apocalyptic and are obsessed with cryptids and out of this world sci-fi stuff this is the game for you one of my playthroughs involved me living off the land for the week but one night i forgot to set up my noise-trap as i went to bed planning out my day for tomorrow i wake up in the middle of the night with a dog-man eating out of my lower abdomen then i died great game to kill time in 9/10

Turn OFF the auto save, otherwise bugs will creep into your game and eventually make it unplayable. This is an addictive game where the decisions you're faced with are in that perfect niche between simple and complex.

extremely sparse content mired in terrible decisions. the only way to survive in this game is to cheat, and even that only gets you so far. not much of a plot, nor explanation of much of anything. tons of RNG and its all against you. all the random events are negative to the extreme, with many being an instant game over if you make any of the 3 wrong choices out of 4.

cool game

An incredible game perfectly suited to my taste. The writing (especially in the Detroit Megacity) is top-notch, a shame there's so little of it. Worth a try. It is not for everyone, but there is a demo available on mobile, so try it out over there first. Don't worry about losing save data - you'd die either way and the only thing that carries over between runs in game knowledge.

good game if u enjoy being homeless in detroit

I wouldn't really call this a finished game. Love the setting, my dear Michigan, love the world of this, but once you figure out how to not die and complete 2-4 basic quests the game is over. Buy it on super duper sale for like 2 dollars like I did.

It's a pretty decent game. It does feel a bit like a prototype in some ways, e.g. the combat system has some interesting ideas but can be a bit wonky. I stopped playing because I encountered an annoying bug that wiped a good chunk of my progress. I'm still going to recommend this game as I enjoyed my time with it.

I'm of the opinion that if there is no demo for a game then piracy is justified, but only to try it out. Unless the game is shit. This one, thankfully, is not and I didn't mind paying.

So what is this game? It's a game where you may fight homeless men to the death for their flip flops, and where four water bottles and a handful of string is considered a good loot haul. It's a game where you can throw hands with a werewolf and win so you can make a coat out of it, then you get a little careless while exploring former suburbia and get a facefull of black mold from opening a cabinet and die days later. It's a game where you can save up and get surgery to get bionic eye implants so you can pinpoint enemy weaknesses with ease, then slink back into the slums and warm yourself by a communal trashcan fire while you dine on a succulent meal of soup you've been saving in your Sonic Team Racing elementary school backpack. If it wasn't for the fact that the police force in Detroit is actually competent in this game I'd say this is a fairly accurate portrayal of Michigan, cryptids and all.

On a real note this game is pretty simple when you get right down to it. You have a hunger, thirst and fatigue meter. Letting one or a couple get too low for too long is a good way to end up dead very quickly. Another important thing to take into account is how you're dressed. This game doesn't have a lot of weather variation, but it is consistently cold. This means that if you can't get yourself adequately clothed pretty quick at the start of a run it'll be over before it begins. This sort of all-or-nothing form of RNG is a problem I'll address in a second. One of the strongest parts of this game is it's crafting system and inventory management. Encumbrance is a feature, but you also have space limits depending on what clothes and accessories you're wearing. NEO uses a grid system and items are sized accordingly. This makes an errant pair of cargo pants found in a car trunk something worth celebrating. Did I mention that weapons, tools and clothes also deteriarate over time? These things can be repaired and maintaned, however the repair items are so rare to find in the wild that it's not something you can depend on. This is just to say that you better get used to rotating clothes pretty normally. There are also shopping carts, sledges and a craftable travoi you can use to increase your weight capacity and item space.

This leads us to the very important aspect of crafting. In character creation you pick from two pools of traits and skills. One good, which costs you points for desireable attributes/skills, and one bad, which gives you a debilitation in exchange for more points to use on the other. Some debilitations are worse than others so some give more points than others. Some of these optional attributes give you access to bushcraft knowledge, fighting skills, technological knowhow and more. But once you're done with character creation you're locked in and it's unlikely you'll get more, so choose carefully! This would be more of a problem if it weren't for the fact that you'll be dying a LOT in your early hours of gametime.
"Okay but you were talking about crafting, what does that have to do with this?"
Because, ye impatient and ill tempered, being able to make your own clothes from pelts and hides can be instrumental in your early game survival. Same thing with how tech knowledge can be instrumental in your lategame survival.

Here's a pro tip if you keep dying of exposure early in a run. Take the traits strong, melee and trapping at creation and stay to fight the dogman in the beginning. This lets you kick the dogmans ass and kill it with few injuries. The reason we took trapping is because you can skin the dogman with a craftable shiv of glass and fabric to make a dogman fur coat. That alone is enough to keep you from dying of exposure for the forseeable future. You can also get the footage of your fight with the beast from the security cameras and use it as leverage to get into Detroit. You can also use the melee trait to craft spears which are both convenient to make and extremely useful in combat even in lategame.

So what problems does this game have? We can start with how bullshit it can be at times. There are a lot of times where you can worm your way out of a bad situation by smart thinking or brute strength. But you'll have a lot more moments where you die from diseases you can't diagnose, taking bad medicine, bandits that one shot you with a rifle, and many other things. The hardcore nature of the game makes any progress feel unimportant since it can be taken away from you so quickly. The other problem is the amount of content. This game does have an ending, and a pretty good one at that, so it's not infinite by any means. And the random encounters you can come across are pretty limited and some of them are quite rare. Once you get the basics of survival down you'll burn through most of the available content in like ten or fifteen hours. The ending is basically a sequel tease but, as of now, it doesn't look like Blue Bottle is working on one since they're so busy on Ostranauts. That wouldn't be so bad but they don't seem likely to add any content to NEO in the interim either. Even worse is that the amount of good mods to add to it are very low as well.

All in all this game is a very well crafted game with about enough content to keep you satiated for a couple days. If you stretch your sessions a bit a part of course. The price is about right, but again with how little content there is I'd reccomend waiting til a sale unless you're just dying to play it.

it's a nice novelty and i have a lot of biased nostalgia but flash really holds the game back
P.S. take off your talisman for free items

Very fun scavenger game

Very Buggy at times when crafting is needed(crashed basically reseted all of my camp sides and made progress in story impossible) But
managed to beat it
and honestly story wise its like a book with multiple possible endings That needs a sequel. Main Hero survives in my point of view.
Game is a flashplayer text+click based making correct choices matters a lot. Knowing what you needs matters a lot.

Created my character, left the cyro facility, scavenged for a bit, made my way to detroit, killed four people that were "in" my way, suffered major wounds to my arms and head, got infected due to improper medical care, rested in my campsite in hope the infection heals on its own, realise I had sepsis, looked up sepsis in google, realise there was no hope for me, slowly died a painful death on the forest ground.
9/10 great and thrilling game, I'd come back to it any day!

Hey Hey People

Pretty good game, but it can be really confusing to get started in. I found it was really fun once I knew what i was doing, but until then it was frustrating. Like most rouge likes, its mildly infuriating, and i personally consider the quests to be below my expectations.

Checking back in 2025, has this game aged well.

Yes, still an impressive game after all these years. So much of this games inventory and crafting system surprises you with its "that makes sense" attitude. Want to store pebbles in your shopping cart? You cant without a container fool!

You should be aware that the game is programmed in Adobe Flash, and it runs in the Adobe Flash player. Aligning the mouse with some of the icons is a struggle. Refunded.

Diamond in the rough-- if it looks even slightly interesting to you, buy it. It's a rough world, but there's so much to discover and every step could be your last. It keeps you on your toes and really makes you think about your choices as you journey for clues of who you once were.

An RPG where you roleplay as the victim.

It seemed like a game I would like but it lacks any QOL and info for the player it becomes annoying. Figuring out the conditions for equipping a different weapon, looting, etc is all unclear and counter intuitive. You cannot even ask yourself in a fight: Am wounded? How badly have I hurt the enemy? Whats the range of this weapon I am using?

Things degrade insanely quickly and weapons in particularly break as if paper. Its made to be a bit of a survival challenge but in strange and tedious ways. Like how many times do characters trip in encounters. Oh there is no loot, wait you can search a location by pressing E, I saw no controls on this or buttons and had to look it up. Even the camping system is inaccessible. The STARTING location needs to be returned to and explored with this same scavenge system by pressing E, a location that you should have already explored, before you can camp out in it. Your character will just sleep on the ground by default on this tile. There is just so many pointless barriers to learning the game.

In addition the menus are clunky and need to be clicked in specific spots. Some menus should really be merged if possible as the layout is not very good. In general game play the lack of sound effects is jarring and noticeable. Least to music is alright.

Its my type of game but badly executed and definitely asking too much at regular price. I might be able to force myself to get into it and ignore big flaws, as I love this particular niche, but I can't blame people if they can't and I won't recommend it.

mASTERP4ECE

Really solid survival game.

If ima be honest, the only reason I picked this up was cause I wanted to play "Ostranaut" but when reading the steam page i realized this was in the same universe. Didnt even know of its existence up until that moment.

So I decided to give it a go and really feel like i stumbled upon a Gem. This game hits different. From the start of the game not knowing anything, im just hovering around the UI seeing what things there are to do. So i end up walking around the world and stumble upon this city. Not knowing what im going to discover i said "why not" as my character is hardly wearing any clothes. that is when i found my first big Item! I nice rifle with a sling that also has a few bullets in it as well as a hoodie and a t-shirt to help with the cold.

Slowly starting to get the hang of it, i sleep for the night to wake up to someone charging me. It felt like this dude was sprinting at me from across the city. So I take my rifle and hide behind cover. Yelling over to the man charging asking to talk but to no success. I gave him a warning that if they dont surrender i will fire. so he kept charging. After putting 2 bullets in the guy he finally surrenders but a few hours later decided to charge at me again and that is when i gave him one last rifle hit with the butt of the gun to finish it off. Thankfully he had some pants and a shoe on him.

A day of resting goes by and i really need another shoe and a drink so i loot the areas nearby fighting dogs and dogmen. I end up becoming very injured and catch a infection, so i decide to rest at camp but only for a dog to come while im resting and picks a fight. As the dog and I exchange blows I hit the dog with the butt of the rifle and it breaks only leaving me to my bare hands. The dog not giving up but coughing up blood manages to get a few bits in. as my character is very hurt he tries to swing 1 more time but slips and passes out. The dog finished the Job and killed me off and i honestly wouldn't want my first death to be any different XD

All in all game is really damn good and excited to put more time into it, Highly Recommend

Highly recommend this game if you love inventory management, dying of sepsis, and also eating people.

10/10, I played so much of this game offline...

The best survival mechanics of any game, probably. very fun

Don't play this game.

I get the idea: scavenging and surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with all the relevant thematic plot devices and mechanics to make it work. I would have recommended the game if it was executed properly, however.

The problem isn't the game's concept, its the execution. Or rather, how its designed. There's a bunch of good systems the game gives you to navigate (quite literally in the case of navigating the landscape), such as sightlines, fog of war, a crafting system that rewards you for thinking out of the box (a recipe might ask for a something to 'start' a fire with, and then using bullets to do so is a valid option). There is also a 'moves' based system, that gives you set amount of moves every 'turn', where you get to do what you want (like hide your tracks, or scavenge or move across the map, and so on).

These mechanics would be great if the rest of the game would actually allow you to gain some traction with them, instead of punishing you for not being able to make your way in the game.

Sometimes, the game asks you to make a decision without knowing the outcome, which usually means it'll catastrophically end the game by putting you in a situation where you're killed. Meaning, there's knowledge you need to have of what's going to happen before it happens to make sure you make the 'right' choice. If not, well, tough shit. You're dead. Good luck replaying the whole game from scratch and experience that stress to get to a semblance of the progress you just made. The point is that you never know what your choices will end up as. For example, there's a 'hiding' skill, and it works sometimes, and other times you just 'conveniently' get found out.
Quote honestly, this game feels like a bad D&D dungeon master is telling the narrative: the actions you take are just an opportunity for the game to suddenly hijack the narrative and what's happening to put you in those bad situations depending on what the game wants.

Other times, mainly in combat, there's nothing you *can* do. As in, having an option to 'retreat', then the enemy advancing, doesn't really change anything. Okay, let's try a different approach. What if *I* advance and hit them with a crowbar? Nope. The enemy doesn't reel bad from a single hit of a solid steel crowbar, or even a gunshot wound. Instead, a dog can bite you and you can hit it with a crowbar, and you both bleed, but somehow you lose.

The gist of this game is that you have very little control, and there's a high chance of you not being able to rely on the things you do have access to, which then results in you dying and having to start over.

I have to praise the developer for designing the game this way if it was their intent: I guess it would accurately portray (even though there's a lack of control you might have in real life) what living in an apocalyptic wasteland looks like.

Besides that, dying and suffering, there's not much to do in the game either. Just scavenging with random loot that's not going to protect you all that much, and following the mainstory. That's it. Death, loot and being railroaded.

=====================
In short: if you like to have no control, to suffer and stress to just be able to play the game itself and like games where the 'progresson' is just trial and error that's out of your own hands, play this game. You'll love it.

If any of those aren't your cup of tea. Stay away. Stay away from this game as much as you can.

Project Zomboid if it was good

PLEASE FINISH THIS GAME I HAVE PUT ALMOST 4,000 HOURS INTO IT AND I LOVE IT I HAVE IT TATTOOED ON MY LEFT WRIST

Tea farming is ez exploit