The Last Caretaker Gameplay Impressions: I've never been so cosy and so lonely

I'm not usually a fan of the survival genre. I often find that the gameplay feels too formulaic. The story and the world often feel wasted by just building a base with no central narrative running through it. To my pleasant surprise, The Last Caretaker largely shirks these irritating trends, with the world and story being a focal point around which everything else orbits.

You are the last Caretaker, a robot that is designed to support humanity after it has left the world a flooded mess. In the game, you'll take a large boat out across the great expanses of water in order to collect human "seeds" and slowly feed them to a point that they'll be able to survive when you send them off into space in the search of a new home.

The gameplay of The Last Caretaker will be familiar to people who've played a survival game before. You'll start with very little and have to build up your resources through machines and the scraps you find within the world. A lot of The Last Caretaker's gameplay centres around energy. Ensuring engines and you are powered so that you can pilot your ship, while also keeping enough energy spare so that you can keep the human seeds alive and have the means to defend yourself. I got to see the very beginning of the game and a much later point, but it was straightforward to see how you'd progress. Channel37 isn't a big fan of direct tutorials, and instead trusts the player to figure out solutions as they go. Even for someone who usually avoids the survival genre, it wasn't too difficult to figure things out, and the way the game naturally invites you to explore was a lot of fun, too.

While it might look a bit bare in terms of environments when you're staring out at nothing but empty grey waters, The Last Caretaker's world remains incredibly interesting. Channel37 has gone to great effort to establish a unique lore for its post-apocalyptic world. I especially loved the detail of the scarf which the main character wears. Orange scarves are also wrapped around teddy bears spotted throughout the game, which were given to evacuee children as they sought to escape the Earth before its destruction.

There's something very sad but also very sweet about that, and I think Channel37 has done a tremendous job in blending the darkness of a world forgotten with the idea that there's still hope to carry forwards. You might be attacked by other robots and metal sharks and it may seem as if the entire planet has become hostile, but you still have a mission to accomplish. It's a great theme to the world. Unlike other survival games, it doesn't feel like The Last Caretaker wants its story to be simply something kept in the background. Instead, you get the sense there is always a thread waiting to be discovered, a twist you didn't see coming lurking right around the corner.

There's a commitment to storytelling mixed with a survival core that I couldn't help but be impressed with. It's quite an isolated experience, but one that allows you to therefore be fully immersed in the world. The use of loneliness contrasts with the cosiness of your overarching goal and the game's imagery, which is often rather sweet as shown by the aforementioned teddy bears. In the saturated survival genre of today, it pays to stand out, and I'm glad to say that The Last Caretaker certainly does. There are plenty of survival games with interesting premises and worlds, but few of them have the gameplay and mechanics revolving so well around the core themes of the narrative.

Survival is a busy genre, especially when you look at the games that allow space for multiplayer, too. But, even if The Last Caretaker doesn't let you team up with other robots, it still feels like a stand-out example of the genre so far. Slight concerns persist about how engaging the overworld will be considering so much of it looks the same, but pushing those aside it's a title fans of survival and sci-fi should have their eyes on.