Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked. While photography-based games are becoming something of an expanding niche, NUTS's premise as a "squirrel surveillance" game is still an intriguing one. The game tasks the player with tracking squirrels' night-time movements across a series of forest areas with strategically-placed cameras, with an environmentalist story providing some narrative drive. While fairly simple, this mechanic works pretty well, with a couple of minor twists - though the later scenarios (there are six) do start to show its limits, as with their longer length the downtime between placing cameras (via first-person exploration), watching back the recorded footage, repositioning and repeating becomes evident - the traipse to and from the caravan observation point becomes increasingly tedious, adding little to the gameplay (though the inclusion of "walking simulator" in the game's official description does, I suppose, give fair warning of this). Overall, NUTS is decent while it lasts (somewhere around 3 hours), but I can't see it sustaining an experience that's much longer than that.

Reviewed on Jun 13, 2023


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