Distrust Demo

Survival games are all the rage nowadays, and there’s no shortage of them, be it from massive developers with millions of dollars in their budgets, or from indie studios trying new and exciting ideas. Replay value is the driving force in the genre, and it also helps if the maps are randomly generated for every playthrough. However, the gameplay mechanics should be the focus, otherwise it doesn’t really matter how nice the environments look.

Distrust is a top-down survival game in which you have to battle much scarier opponents than zombies or monsters, and most of them are not even real. There are some interesting team-based concepts in there as well, not to mention the fact that you have to take full advantage of the environment in order to make. As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that the story is based on the classic movie The Thing.   You are free to form a custom team of three different characters, each one of which comes with special abilities and flaws. It’s possible to control each one of them individually once the action starts, much like in a classic top-down RPG, except not as complex in most regards. Although your main goal is to find a way out of an arctic research station, it’s also important to fend off sleep in order to avoid the madness.

In essence, going to sleep drains your characters and slowly makes them go mad. However, they still need to rest in order to continue, so after a while they end up too tired and haunted by hallucinations, which changes the gameplay entirely. This is a pretty neat gameplay gimmick, but the demo is a tad too short to get a good feel of its potential.   Lastly, the top-down perspective limits the graphics quality in a way, although that’s obviously not a rule. In this case, the levels look a bit empty and repetitive sometimes, probably because they are randomly generated. However, the indoor areas are quite cozy and detailed, even if you might have a hard time distinguishing certain objects, and the sound effects are not too bad either.

Distrust is definitely intriguing and unique in quite a few ways, but the demo is unfortunately not enough to judge its potential. Hence, we can only hope that the full version is going to rise to expectations and provide us with a great experience.