Distrust

Genre: Survival Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Distrust (not to be confused with A Case of Distrust, a completely unrelated game) is a Survival Adventure-style game (like Don’t Starve), where you play as the members of a rescue team sent to an arctic research station that went silent, only for their helicopter to crash under strange circumstances, with the surviving rescuers now finding themselves in need of a rescue. With the harsh elements eating away at your warmth and resources, and your health suffering as the cold, hunger, and exhaustion whittle away at not just your body, but your sanity, your survivors must scrounge up what they need to survive from the facility, while also trying to discover what caused it to suffer this emergency in the first place, and escape to safety before the strange creatures stalking the facility grounds hunt you down, and before you freeze or starve to death.

It’s an amazing setup for a game, with a locale and tone that immediately calls to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing, a clear inspiration for this game, yet with its own unique elements that set it apart. This great atmosphere is further supported by great writing and some excellent sound design that really highlights the oppressive environment your characters find themselves in. The game’s graphics, while nothing special, do a decent enough job supporting this presentation as well, making use of an isometric viewpoint to give you a better overall perspective of the facility.

Despite the creatures you’ll inevitably have to find a way to avoid, and weapons your characters can make use of, the majority of the gameplay here is largely standard survival adventure stuff, though it has been largely streamlined, with the aforementioned warmth, exhaustion, and hunger meters requiring players to keep track of them, and various tools and items to collect and use in the facilities to keep the heat and electricity running, cure ailments, and solve the puzzles necessary to progress through the game’s procedurally-generated levels.

To give the game an added twist, not only is sleeping in a bed necessary to refill a character’s stamina, but even if you find a bed you may opt to hold off, as sleep somehow attracts the creatures you’re trying to avoid. The mechanics of how the strange creatures work is one of the mysteries to solve in the game, and it’s these little nuances, and the tinge of horror themes at the edges of the game, that make Distrust something special and unique in its genre.

Having said that, it’s not without its issues. It’s a bit odd that characters have a combined inventory, teleporting objects to each other as needed. Yet despite this user-friendly lack of realism, the game refuses to show you the interactive elements in darkened rooms unless a character is in that room, even if your characters have already seen them. This makes it harder to locate that one thing you really need and can’t recall where you saw it last. However, probably the biggest issue I have with this game is its control scheme, which isn’t horrible, but it is a bit cumbersome, and really takes a lot of getting used to, and can occasionally result in telling the wrong character to perform a task, or having difficulty selecting the object you want to interact with.

In the end, while Distrust does have a few issues here and there, for the most part this is a solid Survival Adventure game with some great atmosphere. This game may not be for everyone, but fans of the Survival Adventure genre should definitely check it out.

tl;dr – Distrust is a Survival Adventure with a setting and story that’s reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing, working horror and sci-fi elements into the survival formula in a way that does a good job of enhancing it. There are some interface and control issues that can pop up here and there, but fans of the genre would do well to give this game a try.

Grade: B

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