Last year, developer Wombat Brawler released Cast n Chill, a simple fishing game with complex, gorgeous pixel art. It's a game full of downtime, where the gameplay frequently takes a backseat to just soaking everything in, enjoying the sights and sounds of its simulated waterways. This week, Wombat Brawler released a demo for their followup, Wild n Chill, which tries to bring the same vibes to the survival game genre.
Wild n Chill keeps what to me is the most important part of Cast n Chill--the look. While the demo is just a small area, it's evocatively detailed. You can feel the claustrophobic clutter of the woods open up into a small stream or a vast vista while the sounds of the wind and wildlife rustle around you.
There's more to do in Wild than Cast. The survival mechanics are the standard stuff: You manage your stamina, hunger, thirst, temperature, and exhaustion, indicated by a bar divided into different colors. The demo gives you a checklist to complete, serving as a kind of tutorial for how to address these needs, which required walking back and forth picking up stuff until I unlocked relevant crafting recipes. The crafting is also pretty simple--have the correct stuff on-hand and then click to combine it into something new– and it didn't take me long until I had a serviceable campsite near a pond, with a bushcrafted A-frame to sleep in and a fire to warm up beside.
As with Cast's bait shop, a bearded old man soon makes an appearance, and he sends you on some fetch quests that give you better tools and teach you more advanced recipes. It's helpful, if not a little heavy-handed, and I imagine what he gives you will prove useful in the full game. Unfortunately, I hit a bug that didn't let me mess around with the demo's cooking (the developers have written that they've fixed it, though the problem persisted in my game), but what you get and learn lets you do more than just drink water with your hands and eat berries and raw mushrooms.
According to the Steam page, the full game will have 11 areas, plus co-op and advanced crafting. It also seems like the bear that scared the shit out of me but then wandered away will do more than just wander. You can hunt the wildlife you encounter, and there's also a book that records the animals you've seen and information about them, rendered in that gorgeous pixel art that's great just to page through.
Wild's demo doesn't feel quite as relaxing as Cast, and it also doesn't quite rise to the level of complexity I demand from my survival games, but it does sit in its own unique space. It's not too basic, but it's also not too much. Your needs aren't too pressing, and materials are plentiful. The sidescrolling nature of it can be a little constraining at times, especially when the foreground blocked my view of an item, but it also helps the game feel a little safer and more contained than something like The Long Dark's vast, hostile wilderness.
Plus, as in Cast, you have a dog, who in addition to petting you can also throw sticks for. The dog always wants you to throw the stick. I want to say I spent way too long throwing the stick, but there is no "too long" in the demo. Even though there's a day/night cycle, it doesn't impose any kind of limits or dangers; you can stand there throwing the stick as long as you want, while the sky shifts from one kind of pretty to another.
If you like survival games the demo is definitely worth checking out, since it's attempting to do something a little more relaxed with my beloved genre that makes for an interesting spin. And if you don't, what the devs call its "cozy wilderness survival" vibe might be more your speed than harsher games. There's no release date yet, but I'm definitely curious to see how the full game expands while still keeping the feeling that made Cast n Chill so cool.
