Survival games have always been hit-or-miss for me. On the one hand, I have put tons of hours into Minecraft, and playing these games with friends can be a lot of fun. On the other hand, I have definitely seen my share of survival games that just weren’t fun. The Last Caretaker is a game for me that falls in the middle of those two extremes. It is a rather buggy game with poor combat and many slow-moving moments, but it has redeeming qualities in its resource management and building features that could definitely draw in a particular player.
Making a Friend for the End of the World
In The Last Caretaker, you play as a robot who is designated to bring back humanity in a world completely covered in water. So, along the way, you will have to work to power up bases, scavenge resources, craft improving items, and follow the instructions of a voice that is directing you along the way.
Right off the bat, the premise of this game is interesting enough. Throughout the entire time, you are truly alone, aside from various enemies. The voice leading you will pop in for a very short quip and be gone immediately. Throughout this entire game, you are left with your own thoughts. In some ways, I can appreciate that this is a true single-player game right now, but in others, I really wish I had a co-op partner to play with. I spent so much time running back and forth doing tasks that would be so much simpler with one more set of hands, even if that meant them just being able to carry items. If I had to choose one word to describe the overall experience, I would say tedious, which is how I would describe a lot of survival games that didn’t resonate with me.
With early access titles, it is understood that the game isn’t finished, and that’s definitely the case here. There are a lot of bugs in this game. Power cords get very wonky on rails, sometimes melee just stops working, and I was never able to adjust my quickbar to access my tools, requiring me to go the long route of opening the menu and manually setting them every time.
If you are going to play The Last Caretaker, I highly recommend saving to multiple save slots often. The only way to solve the inevitable game-breaking bug you are going to hit is to reload an old save. Most of those bugs are attributed to your ship messing up, but I have also been trapped inside a doorway with no way out. Three times, I lost over an hour’s worth of progress because I had not saved before hitting the bug, or the one slot I was working on was just broken, causing me to completely start from the beginning. That’s not even counting all of the times I died and was set back because there’s no respawning in this game.
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The Tug-of-War Between Power and Weight Management
Commonly in survival games, you need to manage your health, food, thirst, and temperature to keep yourself running. Luckily, The Last Caretaker doesn’t go that far, only requiring you to focus on health and your power. Everything you do will take power, with more intensive tasks like carrying too much weight, making your power bar fall faster than normal. Once you are out of power, you have no access to your tools, and your health will decay until you can find a power source. Especially in the beginning portions of the game, this is incredibly frustrating. Gathering power is so slow, often requiring you to stay attached to your source for minutes at a time, and if you had already cleared the area of things to do, you’re stuck just wasting time until you can detach again. If you happen to be attached to a solar panel at night or when its raining, which happens very frequently, the charge process goes even slower.
Everywhere you go in The Last Caretaker, you need to set up a power grid to make things run, and to do that, you need to constantly be gathering resources by breaking items down. While there is a handy way to do this anywhere with a buzzsaw, that takes up a significant portion of your power. I really enjoyed going around breaking down every item I could find, but the constant need to maintain my power levels and weight was incredibly tiring. There’s no good way to stash your items in The Last Caretaker, unless you want to spend hours going around setting up tons of storage crates just to be neat, but then you’re wasting resources keeping them at one location. I elected instead to just throw everything on the ground on my boat, which seemed like a much better option considering you can craft items with resources that are lying near you, but it also required me to continually return to my boat to get those resources.
You could potentially fabricate a recycler machine to break down items and lessen your weight load, but that requires you to set up another power grid just for that machine, which includes finding the resources, setting up either a solar panel or wind turbine, and then moving your power cord system around to facilitate it. Sometimes, these machines can already be set up, but I found them to be in very weird locations that require a ton of setup to access. There was one instance where I found myself making a recycler just so I could break items down to be able to reach a different recycler further in the base that I wanted. At that point, it becomes a game of constantly fabricating power cords and running them around the place just so you can do basic functions in an area. Once you leave, be prepared to do it all again at the next location endlessly.
The Never-Ending Sea
As mentioned above, the world in The Last Caretaker is completely flooded. You quickly get access to a ship and see just how wide — and empty — the world is. When on the sea, there are various bases littered around the place, but none of them are interesting. There are no islands or endearing landmarks, just various rigs and more water. While I think overall the game looks good on foot, nothing is engrossing about this world when traveling.
One of the more involved tasks in this game is bettering your ship for travel. This involves gathering the proper electricity and diesel to power your ship for the trips ahead. Electricity is much easier to gather with various solar panels and wind turbines, but your ship will move very slowly. Diesel will speed things up slightly (though not by much in my experience), but your ship absolutely chugs through the fuel. Just a simple maneuver to turn my ship around cost me 10% of a full tank of diesel.
If you want to take the time, setting up your ship with a lot of power sources and various machinery can put you in prime position to succeed in The Last Caretaker. Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of person who has the patience for that. I like to get what I need and focus on that, which in this case, makes things more painstakingly slow, and then things get complicated as you unlike more machinery.
Throughout my time playing The Last Caretaker, I often felt like I was at a loss. Outside of the game telling you where to go for the next quest location, you are given freedom to do what you want, but with that comes next to no instruction for how things work. The first 7-8 hours of my time playing, I didn’t know that electricity would allow me to pilot my ship. I was under the impression that electricity only worked for powering the lights and machines on your ship, and that diesel needed to be gathered to actually move it. I often found myself stranded at sea, with one particular instance where I started swimming through the ocean for a good 45 minutes to go find a diesel tank on a remote rig, only to finally come back and find my ship had glitched out, with all of my machines floating in the air and my ship no longer able to move. The only fix was to reload a save from 3 hours prior.
Descriptions for items in the game give you no real idea of what they do. It essentially comes down to you knowing the item’s use already or doing a lot of experimentation, which some players will likely love, but I just don’t have the time for that these days.
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This Robot Was Not Made for Combat
While much of your time in The Last Caretaker is spent sailing and setting up power at rig, there is also a significant amount spent on eradicating various pests. At night, leeches come out of the sea and will attack you if you are not near a light source, and there are various pods in every location filled with other enemies that will constantly refill and send more at you until you destroy them. In small batches, these enemies are not terrible to deal with, but they get tiring fast. Instead of spending my electricity and life clearing out leeches on an unpowered rig, I often just found it easier to sit on my boat for about 20 minutes and let the sun come back up because there’s no sleeping option to fast-forward to dawn. It’s not worth the effort, considering you’re just going to be dealing with similar small robots and jelly monsters inside.
Your main source of fighting off these creatures is a simple melee, which is really only good for taking out one small enemy at a time and doing slow damage to the pods that spawn them, and it doesn’t feel good to use anyway. Even when you hit, there’s no real feeling of impact. There are locations where you can be dealing with dozens of enemies at once. In that case, you want to have the electric pistol crafted and charged. Hopefully, you went out of your way to do that on your own because the game doesn’t tell you it is needed. Oh, by the way, the electric pistol has next to no effect on certain enemies and very quickly runs out of juice, requiring you to continually run back and forth to charge it up. In that case, you might want to have multiple firearms on you, but as stated above, my quickbar never worked, requiring me to open my inventory, find the gun, and manually equip it to deal with enemies in the moment.
In my time playing The Last Caretaker, I saw the option to have three different pistols: one electric, one fire, and one with normal bullets. None of them impressed me much, though they did have very specific areas they were good for. As noted above, electricity was only really good for dispatching a group of leeches and small robots, while the normal gun was better for getting rid of pods from a distance. Crafting the bullets for that weak-firing weapon was not worth it, though, as you will quickly find yourself just needing to continually spend your resources on it. It’s much better to be very selective about when you shoot it.
Throughout my time playing, there were two other robot types I ran into: sharks and a flying type called angels. While both scared me at first sight, I never actually engaged with either. Both are passive creatures, with sharks letting me freely swim by them to my surprise. Not once in my time playing did I fight any of them. I’m sure at some point, taking them out for a certain resource is good, but the only antagonists I dealt with were leeches, small spider-like robots, and jelly.
Final Thoughts
The Last Caretaker is a game that will endear itself to a more dedicated fan of survival games than I am. Gathering resources and building items in this game feels good, but that’s about all I took away from this experience positively. The sailing is so slow and boring in an uninteresting world, the combat never feels good, and the constant need to set up power grids and wait for a slow charge makes all of this come together as a test in tedium. That’s even before you consider all of the game-breaking bugs and the need to constantly manage your save files.
There was definitely more road for me ahead when I decided to call things quits, but all I saw in my future was more instances of having to figure out on my own how the various new systems in the game worked. It didn’t look like something I wanted to do, but I could absolutely see a situation where one of my friends who is more into this kind of game would enjoy that kind of stuff. For me, the $35 price tag is quite steep for the state of the game and how it just doesn’t work the way I would like it to. For the true survival sicko that wants to endlessly manage these systems, maybe wait a bit for some more updates, but you’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit.
