Preview: The Last Caretaker
The world came to an end again, as the world tends to do. This time it was flooding, with the melted ice caps covering almost the entire planet with a giant ocean that makes Earth’s big blue marble even bluer than it had been before. Remnants of the structures created by centuries-gone humanity still poke above the waves, but that’s the only thing indicating people lived on Earth for millennia before finally breaking it beyond repair. Or at least breaking it for human habitation, because the ocean life is probably thrilled that it gets a whole planet to call its own. Somewhere under the waves a crab with a terrible accent is singing about how it’s better down where it’s wetter, but up above is wind and waves and sky right up to the edge of space, and very little else. Until one day a robot wakes up and starts to work on its one purpose of saving humanity.
A Big Mission For One Small Forgotten Robot
The Last Caretaker is an oceanic first-person adventure set above the waves of a watery Earth, all humans and other land-based animals gone, but with occasional pockets of automated systems still ticking away. When a robot reactivates in a mostly-empty station, it only remembers one objective, which is to send humanity’s “seeds” into space. First, though, it’s going to need to find them, and then get the rockets working to blast the cargo off planet.
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Granted, that leaves a whole load of unanswered questions like “Where are the rockets going?” or “What good will sending what can only be assumed to be frozen embryos into space do?”, but The Last Caretaker is still early in development so there are a lot of secrets it’s not ready to reveal yet. I was able to play through the first area of the game at PAX East, though, and it left me wanting to play far more than I had time to in order to learn what might be hidden in the current build. Starting off in a darkened room, the first job was to restore power, but even before that, it’s hard to resist throwing around every piece of furniture in the starting room. Every object has physics, and if there are too many things in the way, a hand-saw does a nice job of dismantling them into their component parts.
While the crafting aspect wasn’t available, one of the major gameplay elements of wiring is the first thing you’ll do to restore power. Giant cables connect many different pieces of equipment to each other, carrying electricity or fuel where it needs to go. It’s not the kind of thing that’s easily shown off in fancy videos because it just doesn’t look all that exciting, but when you eventually have machines everywhere all hooked together, it promises to produce the kind of spaghetti that puts a little spark made of equal parts joy and despair in an automation gamer’s heart. Still, The Last Caretaker is more an adventure game than anything else, so while there’s base-building and survival in there, the bulk of the game is exploring the world and finding all the bits needed to launch a rocket.
I got to play through the first area of the game at PAX East, though, and it left me wanting to play far more than I had time to in order to learn what might be hidden in the current build.
The section of game I played was a guided tour to the boat that acts as home base and transportation, climbing up from the lower floors of the starting area and figuring out how to launch into the open seas. Restore power, hit light switches, collect bits and pieces that would come in handy if I’d been able to play farther along to the crafting section, etc. Not shown off in the build was combat, which is planned to be a part of the game but not the major focus. Various areas still have working security systems, fish-bots swim the oceans and those weird growths are in the trailer don’t look any too friendly. It’s dangerous out there and an intrepid robot isn’t going to be able to survive it all with just a cool orange scarf for protection.
The Last Caretaker made a great first impression, presenting a fascinating world for a robot to adventure through. The platforms rising up from the ocean are all hand-crafted and designed to be explored, and some of them even go deep under the surface for undersea exploration. There’s also open-water exploration as well but not too deep, because the pressure will destroy the bot if it goes too far down. Above the waves, piloting the boat between platforms should give a decent amount of time to work on the base’s setup, but there’s no law that says you can’t just rest in the middle of the ocean when needing a bit more time to get things just right. The planet is broken and humanity needs saving again, because it was never capable in the first place of saving itself, but a few centuries after the end of the world there’s plenty of time to hang out in a boat and enjoy the sea before launching the next rocket to its unknown destination.
