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rewindfrequency · 7 years

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Organ Trail Complete Edition Review

Organ Trail: Complete Edition Review

Developed and Published by: The Men Who Wear Many Hats

Played on: Microsoft Windows

Also Available on: Linux, PS4, PS VITA, IOS, and Android

Organ Trail is a parody of the much-beloved Oregon Trail. This game flips the classic Oregon trail on its head. As with all rogue-like games there isn’t much story here. It’s a straight to the point plot of you and four of your friends (whom you can name) are stuck in Washington D.C. when the zombie apocalypse starts. You receive the help of a man named Clements, who teaches you how the game works and drives you to D.C. in his trusty station wagon. But within the first five minutes of the game, he dies and you’re on your own. Shortly afterwards you hear on the radio that D.C. is going to be nuked by the military and the only safe place in America is “Safe Haven,” which happens to be in Salem, Oregon. In this game, while the car is on the road you don’t do any actual driving. The car moves on the path you set it on. You can choose where you want to go after you are done visiting your current stop. The majority of the gameplay centers on your character walking around shooting zombies or bandits. Shooting in this game is old school, requiring you to pull back on the mouse and release to fire a shot.

The gameplay mechanics are the same as Oregon Trails with a zombie twist on them. The wagon is replaced with a station wagon, your family is replaced with your friends, outposts are now cities and random stops, and hunting is now scavenging. Most of the gameplay takes place in the car. Since you are driving from D.C. to Salem, you need to stock up on supplies. At the beginning of the game you get a certain number of points that you use to stock up on supplies. You can stock up on fuel, food, car parts, et cetera. The higher the difficulty the less points you get. In the complete edition of the game you have many branching paths that allow you to travel all over the country. Most stops are in the “danger zones,” which are areas with high amounts of radiation that wear on your party’s health. There are two types of locations you can find in this game: cities and locales. In cities there is always an auto shop where you can get your car fixed and buy new tires and so on. In locales there are combat trainers who can teach you “skills” such as how to make your bullets travel faster and how to find medkits while scavenging. You can pick up jobs at these road stops, such as fending off an approaching zombie horde or finding a package someone left behind. The best type of job to take is graveyard. Even though it’s the most difficult job to take, it can really be exciting. In this mini-game you are stuck within a graveyard and have to retrieve a package. As you run towards the package the dead rise from their graves and chase after you. Not only do you have to be accurate with your shots but you also have to find the best way out while more and more zombies rise from the grave. This game mode is only in the complete edition. No matter the difficulty you play on, these missions have their own difficulty levels that increase as you go west. A big part of road stops however is that you can rest at them. As you drive on the path to Safe Haven your friends take damage. You can mitigate that damage by giving them more food per hour, but that has its own issues.

On the road to Safe Haven you will eventually run out of food or scrap metal needed to fix the car. You can get more food and scrap and other items by scavenging. Buying these items is possible at all road stops, however this can cost a lot of money and you can find that while scavenging as well. This is probably the most boring part of the game. Essentially, you walk around a box with little bits of environment thrown in and pick up items that randomly appear out of nowhere. If you wait for the afternoon hours when there aren’t many zombies, you only have to shoot a few zombies and maybe the occasional bandit. Because this is something you have to do constantly, it can get real boring really fast.

You can also trade with other survivors. Most of the time the deals they give you don’t make any sense. If you run out of fuel they’ll try to make a deal such as “I’ll give you 1 fuel if you give me 25 scrap”. On the flip side, they also give deals that disadvantage them such as “I’ll give you 5 fuel for 10 ammo”. Ammo is very common, by the way. Over time your car will break down from driving so you can fix it in one of two ways. You can either use scrap metal and play a time based mini-game to fix the car or use money to pay someone at a city auto-shop to fix it for you.

While playing Organ Trail you will encounter random events on the road. These are both comical and serious. One time I walked into a church where are man asked me to shoot him to get his soul into heaven. Another time I saw a mad scientist get consumed by the Box O’Zombies device. These events are enjoyable because they make you feel like a real survivor having to deal with other people who are suffering and having to make decisions that affect your party. But I’ve noticed through many of my playthroughs that while situations rarely repeat, they are few and far between. These random encounters are probably the best part of the game and there are so few. And if you detour into the extra areas in the complete edition sometimes they don’t happen at all, even though the steam store page says there are more random encounters.

But Organ Trail does make up for it somewhat by adding in tombstones. You also encounter these randomly on the road. They are messages written by the developers and kickstarters of the game. They tend to be funny and if you’re lucky you can get a car upgrade out of them.

Even though random encounters are fun and all, another factor that makes this game so funny is what happens to your friends throughout the game. Not only do they get infected with cholera and super dysentery, they also react to their surroundings. “Ben sits on 4 scrap and ruins it,” “Michael is taken hostage by a bandit and you ‘accidently’ shoot him.” They don’t help you in combat. They don’t help you get supplies. They don’t really do anything for you because if you die the game is over. The only time they help is when you need to navigate a zombie horde or when they provide cover fire at the end of the game (Which I won’t spoil).

The normal story mode ends once your team enters Safe Haven but there is still more content to play through. They have endless mode, which is like the core game except it doesn’t end until you die. During this mode you are far more likely to encounter random events and tombstones than in the normal game. In this mode, instead of starting with a certain number of points, you spend for supplies based on your difficulty level you instead pick a loadout which is a prepicked set of items you will need on the road. There are 20 of these but you start with 5. You unlock more loadouts by completing skulls, which are challenges such as traveling a certain distance without dying or killing so many of one type of zombie. This mode is also useful for unlocking content in the story mode and endless mode. There are 10 characters to choose from, but you only start with four and have to unlock the other six. You only start with the station wagon but, are able to unlock 4 more vehicles each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Endless mode can get old however because even though you have the random encounters and tombstones to keep you entertained, it can get old after awhile. The game tries to vary things up by adding challenges to give you more points, such as starting the game with every survivor infected or having a baby in the car that you need to keep safe. This definitely adds length to the mode, but overall I feel like it’s a secondary feature.

The game has more content buried in the extras section. This includes the tombstones you have found while on the road in both endless and story mode. You unlock 50 new tombstones after beating story mode. A Halloween mode which adds little holiday-themed quirks to the adventure such as replacing food with candy and the campfire with a jack-o-lantern. The final piece of extra content is Clements’ Quest. It’s meant to look like a poorly made flash game where you drive the car as Clements to Safe Haven, and then have to drive backwards to D.C. again. These are nice little additions that really keep the game fresh.

The aesthetics of the game perfectly parody Oregon Trail. It’s pixel art style is not only inviting, but harkens back to its inspiration, which can really bring nostalgia out of older players and invoke a sense of having played Oregon Trail in younger players. The soundtrack, while simple, fits the mood perfectly. At times the music sounds like it’s a race against time to get to Safe Haven, while at other points it feels more like a relaxing tone that shows the journey is long and will take time. I have to say that not only as a parody but also a game, the Organ Trail is able to both honor the game that spawned it while carving its own path, making it truly unique.

I am going to give Organ Trail: Complete Edition an 8 out of 10

Pros:

A great parody with its own identity

A great sense of humor

A gameplay formula that remains entertaining through multiple playthroughs

A variety of jobs to do at road stops

Cons:

More random events in story mode would be nice

Scavenging is boring and repetitive

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