I had a coworker describe this as "oh, it's like Day Z meets The Sims" and I guess that works? Really, I think the best point of comparison is NEO Scavenger, but that game gives me the impression that its fans use command-line web browsers, and Backloggd probably doesn't look great on those, so I'm assuming there's not very many of you here.

I normally despise survival games, and I think it's because for most of them, the "challenge" in surviving is that you have to run around for a long time before you can find the right thing to press E on to fill whatever bar is currently low. If you've only played a couple hours of Project Zomboid you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's similar, since you can survive pretty well doing just that for the first few in-game days. Food rots quickly, though, and canned food is finite, so you'll need to find a food source that isn't just "my neighbor's refrigerator" pretty early. Survival requires real planning and investment in Zomboid, not just reacting to short-term needs. And given that a single mistake of basically any kind can cause your death on standard settings, setting and achieving a goal (or even just surviving a week) feels like a real victory, no matter how small the ambition.

The early game of NEO Scavenger and PZ are pretty similar, although in my experience you escape "early game" much faster in PZ - unless you chose the "starter kit" option, your earliest moments in the game will be defined by running around the map with whatever you can cram in your pockets/hands: a bag of some kind (probably a trash bag), some vaguely weapon-like object, a couple ready-to-eat food items, and the most portable water receptacle you can get your hands on. If you survive long enough to set up a secure-ish base, you're probably set until the power and water cut off. After that, your next big difficulty hurdle will be to do all of this in the winter, with all that entails.

Big flaws? It's survival for its own sake, there's no endgame, and the developers have indicated that they have no interest in adding an end other than death for the player. If you can survive the winter and have a sustainable food source, only respawned zombies (on by default) will still pose a threat, meaning that the player will have to come up with some additional goals that aren't survival-related to keep things going. There's also the matter of early access - as things stand, the level of detail present in the game can lead players to make some misleading conclusions. In a game where you can die from cuts acquired while walking without shoes, you would assume first aid is a useful skill - wrong. Levelling carpentry or foraging will radically change your capabilities when interacting with those systems, but some skills (first aid is just the worst offender) function as noob traps, something that you should never go out of your way to improve. For the impatient, this game is also updated slowly - every new system added has comparable levels of depth right from the start, so while the devs post about upcoming changes constantly, no major content has been added since their (massive, overhaul-level, and yet remarkably stable) Build 41 update 7 months ago.

PZ seems to be one of the great success stories for Steam's Early Access program - you could release this game as-is and I don't think people would have much to complain about, so it's exciting to see that the devs are still feeling ambitious - NPCs, animals, an overhauled crafting system, etc. I think I've given somewhere in the range of 10-15 copies of this game since it first arrived on Steam 9 years ago, so I'm probably not the best suited to an impartial evaluation of this product, but $20 seems like a no-brainer of an investment for a product that has steadily improved this much and maintained a consistent level of stability/polish along the way.

girlfriend and I bought this in the sales, decided to try it out

1 hour in, we finally met up with each other after numerous deaths

2 hours in, we got a safe farmhouse with some basic starting supplies and were ready to explore and see what was about

4 hours in she got infected and I had to shoot her out back of the barn :'(

7 hours in, we have a ton of loot, some crops growing, a good amount of time since we last had any accidents

9 hours in, after finding some actual wood axes and really good backpacks, we get run down by a horde and lose everything. it's late at this point, we're tired and kinda wanna go to bed, it went from being really fun to REALLY stressful

11 hours in, we finally get our loot back and make it home safe. we can now sleep easy knowing victory was hours (after dozens of attempts and fighting zombie versions of ourselves in the process)

10/10 would play and stress dream that night again

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is one of the jankiest games that ever janked ever.

But it is also a stunningly imaginative RPG with lots of immersive sim sprinkled in for good measure.

The main hook is that this is a historical RPG. It takes place in early 15. Century Bohemia during the throne war that happened at that time. And whilst the developers do not get everything right, it just floored me how rich in detail and historically accurate the setting is, along with the meticulously recreated geography of the region. That alone made that game sooo unique.
And it absolutely was a joy to play despite the noticable jank that invaded all parts of the gameplay and presentation, especially the combat.

If you are interested in RPGs, and/or interested in history and/or interested in unique gaming concepts, then you owe it to yourself to actually try this game out.

This review doesn’t contain direct spoilers, but it reveals a little bit of the game’s charm that would ideally be discovered on your own. If you were already intending to play it, I would say to just go ahead with my blessing.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance contains one of my favorite sidequests in any game I’ve ever played, and it’s all the better for being completely unmarked. In fact, most people won’t even perceive it as a sidequest, since it’s simply the result of a few systems interacting in a unique way. The goal of this quest is to save your game.

In a move to make the game feel more like reality, your ability to save is limited to sleeping in a secure bed, doing a save/quit, or consuming a certain potion. Since beds can’t be found just anywhere, and bouncing your game every time you want to save is annoying, one of the first things players will want to do is procure these potions. At a merchant, they’re 100 groschen each, and when late-game armor is 1.5k groschen, you can see how unaffordable it is to constantly chug them down. The far better alternative is to buy the recipe and use it to brew as many as you want. So, you do, and open up the recipe to see that you can’t read it. You’re a blacksmith’s son in early 15th century Bohemia, of course you can’t read. So, you have to go talk to people and find out where you can learn, because no one around you knows how to read either, and if they do, they’re too busy to deal with a peasant like you. Eventually you’ll get a good tip to find someone in a certain village, so you walk all the way there, ask around for that person, pay them, and learn the basics, which still doesn’t make the text completely clear. You have to keep reading to raise your skill, on top of going back to actually find the ingredients and learn how to do the brewing.

Is doing all that necessarily fun? No, and the way saving is limited may not even be a great idea to start with, but I highly value what’s being conveyed with this sort of structure. The game is far from actual realism, but these challenges still present the reality of a character confronted with all the trials of his time. As you overcome these challenges and start to thrive, it feels like a genuine accomplishment, and having other characters react to that and respect you more is incredibly rewarding. Dealing with the clunkiness endemic to games focused on realism may outweigh the satisfaction for a lot of people, especially when the plot itself is underwhelming, but it’s the little stories like this personal quest that made me really appreciate the game. They’re the type of stories you can’t experience just by watching or reading, the kind that you’re actually a part of, and any game that’s able to build that sort of player involvement is always worth a look.