Recently, Garbage: Hobo Prophecy – a simulator of a “trash heap” who needs to manage a group of homeless people and lead them to prosperity, suddenly burst into the top of popular new Steam products . The authors themselves joke that their game is based on real life. In fact, the game is even better than reality: only here the rest in a cardboard box during frost will pass without consequences.
When you look at it, Hobo Prophecy is a demo of Garbage , a game currently in development on F95Zone. For the studio Homebased, it became the debut project, and shows a small part of what awaits the players in the final version. And “Garbage” is waiting for them – this is a laconic translation of the name of the game into Russian. The name seems to be self-ironic, and therefore captivating.
Unlike Cyberpunk 2077 , a character can have only one backstory. In our case, the “street kid” turned out to be a gray-haired bum named Maxim, who was to become the best fighter in the area and win fame in the sewers, participating in clandestine battles among the most powerful homeless people in the city. Gradually, other characters joined Maxim, for example, the Asian Kenshi, skillfully begging for alms.
Gameplay Garbage:
Hobo Prophecy is something like The Sims , but about homeless people. If you do not control the heroes, then they themselves will do what they think is necessary: ??they will run under the street shower to wash in order to improve hygiene, or they limp to the fire to warm up. By default, heroes perform the last action assigned to them until they run out of “energy” to perform actions, be it begging in order to get food and dollars, or training with a barbell to pump muscles. You can restore energy through sleep or food.
Surviving in the harsh conditions of the game is no easier than in any Frostpunk : our charges get sick, freeze, starve and get nasty infections. Each hero has three basic parameters: “hygiene”, “hunger” and “warmth” like difficult person test. And if everything is clear with the first two, it is difficult to achieve warmth in street conditions – for this, the heroes need clothes, and preferably not an alcoholic T-shirt, but something warmer, as well as an improved bed, or at least a supported fire in an antediluvian fire. If you let the parameters go too low, then the heroes will have a whole bunch of problems: from hypothermia to exotic sores that can only be cured with antibiotics.
Procedural generation creates various mini-quests and situations, we meet hostile homeless people with hairstyles like the Prince’s singer, and enemy lumpen, and then policemen, begin to regularly visit our area and bring difficulties to our native garbage. Additional activities appear: for example, growing flowers and plants in your garbage mini-garden. In the demo, only one large area is available, consisting of several locations. Each location has its own fixed tasks and procedurally created quests, so each new passage will delight you with some new details. In the first playthrough, the quest was given by the seller of hot dogs, and the second time it was “ordered” by one of the hard workers. Only few people will see this if they risk playing Garbage: Hobo Prophecy more than once.
The thing is that we faced a huge number of bugs – one of the screenshots promises an experience “just like Night City, only with a working AI.” Pure lies, there are no fewer mistakes(like [pii_email_aef67573025b785e8ee2]) here than in Cyberpunk 2077 on the day of release. Even the algorithm for finding the path from A to B is worse here than in the Eastern European RTS strategies from the late 90s. The characters often forget the action that we assigned them, and stupidly stand next to the active point, forgetting to stir the gruel in a street pot, or just go to bed. Once there was a bug due to which the lumpen did not grab the barbell, but the animation worked. Grandfather Maxim “rocked” with air instead of a heavy projectile, and experience points were not added.
Conclusion:
And, finally, the warhead – it is also a curve. All battles are automated, just like in Auto Chess . We just swing our fighters, buy perks and skills for them, which they automatically use in battle. It is impossible to choose targets, only those whom we will send to fight. BomzhUnderlords ?
