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Preview: Sheltered

Those at Unicube, the developers of Sheltered, must have had one big collective nervous breakdown as Bethesda announced Fallout Shelter at their E3 press conference this year. If they didn’t, I’d honestly be disappointed; straight up, Bethesda’s mobile offering is leaps and bounds better than the indie darling Sheltered so desperately wants to be.

Born from a Kickstarter campaign that wanted to pay homage to Oregon Trail, Fallout and Wasteland, Sheltered is, so far, a half-baked game now available to test drive via the Xbox One Game Preview program.

In my time with the title, I was tasked to take a struggling, post-apocalyptic family of four and tend to their needs. In a side-view, underground shelter, the controller is used to point and click to drink water, build beds, new rooms and engage in other – very menial — tasks. If you head to the surface, you need to open an inner and outer door, and then close them behind you as well. Don’t forget to put your hazard suit on before you do that, and to take it off once you’re finished.

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Every action ends up a regrettable, boring click.

Sheltered’s pixelated look is meant to be endearing and offer up nostalgia for old-school survival games like Oregon Trail, but even there fails. Everything is drab and soulless. Objects are so similar it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart. But who cares when you have a crafting system, am I right?

Worse yet, Sheltered seems to pride itself on being difficult, though not in a way I really was able to learn from and adapt to. I tried three times to keep my family alive, but never made it past the ten day mark. My first go, I got medicine for my children far too late into their mutual sickness; fair enough. The second and third times around, I easily rectified this. Everyone was looking healthy and happy… and boom. Dead. No explanation why. It sucked.

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Micromanagement is the most important part of Sheltered. Rainwater is used for the toilets and for drinking. Your survivors need to drink constantly, especially after putting in some effort. A lack of sleep means fatigue, and ultimately death. For something so paramount to the game, the real disappoint is that no action ever feels fun. This is a stark contrast to Fallout Shelter, which manages to exude a powerful sense of lonliness and desperation in a much smaller package. Fallout Shelter also manages to take super-small rooms and cram in so much detail it should make Sheltered just plain ol’ jealous.

Elements of the game seem like they’d be fun; a shelter-less place-to-place wanderer mode is on the cards, though it’s not ready to try out yet. Points for imagination though.

The fact of the matter is, Sheltered is a very rough around the edges work-in-progress that you’d be better off avoiding for the time being. It’s a testament to games that aren’t really ready for public consumption making it to an early access scheme… but hey, if you want to become an unpaid pre-alpha tester, be my guest.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.