This is an unusual one: a survival game set in a flooded world that’s maybe Earth, where you’re a robot known as a Caretaker whose purpose is to grow humans in pods, imbibe them with memories and launch them into space (where they will presumably live). But there’s an air of mystery over the whole thing. You appear to be, as the game’s title tells us, the last Caretaker, and you’ve been reactivated at a point in time where you’re not sure what, if anything, still exists. The sea-based facility you ‘wake up’ on is in disrepair and as you set about re-powering and repairing it, and boating around on the sea nearby, a bigger question forms: what is going on?
This game comes from a collection of former RedLynx developers and their newish (created in 2021) seven-person studio Channel37, which counts Antti Ilvessuo – the original creator of motorbike game Trials – among its founders. You might remember Ilvessuo from Ubisoft’s E3 2018 conference where he was clad in a white jumpsuit and barrelled onto the stage to break the podium, as part of a planned stunt. He’s a character. And it’s Ilvessuo who reveals The Last Caretaker to me in a video call, with former Rooster Teeth presenter Jack Pattillo demoing the game.
Excitingly, The Last Caretaker isn’t like anything I’ve seen before. It has elements I recognise and I’m sure you will too, but they’re combined in a way that feels fresh. When you begin, for example, it’s a sort of first-person puzzle game. You’re in the bowels of a facility with no power so you need to work out a way to incrementally turn it all back on. You notice unplugged cables, which are a recurring theme in the game – except they’re less like cables from day-to-day life and more like hosepipes firefighters use – only you can’t plug them in because they’re not long enough. Obstacle one, then, is finding extra cabling and attaching it so that you can.
Now the doors have power, you can open them and begin exploring the rest of the facility. As you do, you’ll see robots like you broken and strewn across hallways, which seems ominous. You’ll also discover other plug-in points where you can do things like recharge your health-like energy by plugging into them via your belly button (it looks like, at least) and save your game. As it stands, The Last Caretaker is a single-player game. There are online ambitions, Ilvessuo says, but they’re an idea for another time.
Eventually, after a bit of exploration, you come to an area you will return to many times in the game: a hanger with a boat. Your boat, it turns out, which you will sail out on the open seas with as you look for salvage and answers. You’ll also find a computer terminal there that pipes quests and lore to you, and downstairs there’s a warehouse with machines that can fabricate equipment for you.
All of this needs plugging in and powering, too – I told you it was a recurring theme – but it shouldn’t be too long until you’re ready to open the hanger and see what’s out there, and here’s where the open-world part of the experience begins. All around you is what appears to be sea, and you can seemingly chug out in any direction to explore it. The boat is intentionally slow to allow you time to ponder the fate of the world, or chat to your audience if you’re a streamer (they are a key consideration here, Ilvessuo says), but you can upgrade the boat and speed it up if you wish.
Life on the open seas isn’t entirely safe, though. There are dangers out there such as mecha-sharks and explosive buoys or mines, so no journey will be without peril. You can defend yourself, though, with a range of weaponry including a heady array of guns that either fire bolts, electricity or fire. And they’re modular things so you can alter them seemingly on the fly, using systems that make the game feel distinctly like a shooter. There’s a nice moment where Pattillo makes the character look at the gun and several modular pop-up boxes appear. The presentation is often streamlined like this: there’s little in the way of a user interface, with almost all of the information given dynamically in the game.
There isn’t a lot of combat in the demo I see, by the way – the mini oil rig facility we arrive at is abandoned and only needs powering on. But in the game’s debut trailer you can clearly see fighting. Flamethrowers belch fire, electro-guns spew charge, and spheroid robots with gun-arms defend structures of some sort. It’s a declaration that this will be a core part of the game. There’s also a bulbous kind of plant-like plague seen growing across the metal surfaces of facilities in the trailer, giving us a strong impression of ‘something has gone very wrong’, and to that end I see some aggressive black blob-like things crawling around in the demo. Clearly, something is amiss.
Further on in the game, you’ll discover the impressive facility you are programmed to work at – the place with pods that you manufacture humans in, or “spark life” as the game calls it. We whisk through this in our demo, but finding memory-laden objects to imbue these ‘sparks’ with memories and perfecting their DNA sound like other key parts of the game. Then, once you’ve completed a batch, to liken them to a box of eggs, you’ll need to find a launchpad facility with a rocket so you can place them on it and fire them into space. Then… You’ll have to wait and see.
It’s a curious blend, and as you can see from the debut trailer, it’s handsomely realised. There’s believable detail to the world around you, and it’s mesmerising watching the sea undulate up and down and all around your boat as you chug through it. I don’t think I’ve seen a sea as convincing since Sea of Thieves. I’m also really pleased to hear Ilvessuo place an emphasis on the importance of story in the game, and in bringing together the fragmented threads of mystery weaved through it, because it makes it sound like a world that’s filled rather than one that’s barren. Mix all of that together with the freeform DIY shenanigans of crafting, and there’s a compelling recipe here, I think. But most importantly of all, it’s different. I’ll look forward to the summer when I can try it out properly in early access.
fbq('init', '560747571485047');
fbq('track', 'PageView'); window.facebookPixelsDone = true;
window.dispatchEvent(new Event('BrockmanFacebookPixelsEnabled')); }
window.addEventListener('BrockmanTargetingCookiesAllowed', appendFacebookPixels);