NEO Scavenger

good game

I have played probably a 100 hours of NeoScavenger on the GoG version. It's hard, gritty, and simply the best game if you want to experience the scary, survivor side of post apocalypse.

The combat is all text, but similar to dwarf fortress, it's a full simulation that's so naturalistic you going to feel it in your stomach. Fight cannibals, be a cannibal, rob, be robbed, look for mysteries or just get to the first safe place and try to afford living there.

This game is something.

what the hell is going on

I had $500, a full stomach, prime supplies to keep me going for a long while, and then a wolfman bashed me in the head while I was at full health and caused me to die immediately to a traumatic brain injury. This game is great.

Had a good run going, got a shotgun and a pistol from some bandits and found some ammo for them. Thought I was doing pretty well, spotted a bandit with a nice backpack and no weapons. Piece of cake, I thought.

I got jumped, shoved to the ground, kicked in the ribs while I was down and eventually punched in the forehead so hard my character instantly died of brain damage.

10/10

have you ever wanted to roleplay as a hobo who has to brutally murderer other person to steal their shoes? if yes, then this game is for you

And yes, despite its text based nature, character deaths and their condition is somewhat detailed, which is a nice touch.

now, let me talk about how my adventure went:
first, i beaten up a dogman, was an easy one.
looted some towns, and found... a melonhead! i did not liked how he looked, so i just beaten him to death with a glass shard. tried his meat... it was the tastiest meat i ever ate
shortly after, another one appears! i kill this one too, and he drops a shoe. ate him too.
and... ANOTHER ONE! beaten this one to death with a stone instead.
and... yet another melonhead. this one was beaten to death with a stick. Decided to watch him bleed out on floor, but he did not died, so i just finished him off with throwing pebbles at him. is this a sign of good luck?
and... yet another one. i'm exterminating melonhead race at this point... blacked out after getting some good hits with crowbar on him, thankfully he did not stole anything. however, i woke up with hypothermia, and died shortly after.
curse you, melonheads!

The Native Americans took their land back, 10/10

l like the story and the game play.

I love this game on paper, but I can't seem to stick with it for more than a few hours whenever I play.

NEO Scavenger isn’t fun—it’s a controlled descent into entropy. If you want heroes, go to church. If you want truth, drink rainwater from a toilet bowl while hiding from raiders. This game will not reward you—it will reveal you.

A weird survivor game that I generally fail at, but continue to try again every year or so. One of the few games I try to replay.

Stabbed, tackled, kicked, robbed, spared, an innocent man before changing my mind and chasing him down to kick the absolute shit out of him again. 11/10

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.