March 23, 2017
MarkBernstein.org
 

Crashlands

Crashlands

A game, available for Mac/iOS/Android, in which you wander around a (very big) map, collect stuff, and turn that stuff into other stuff that helps you make more stuff. Around the map, you run into all sorts of monstrous automata that try to stomp you; hunting them gives you other kinds of stuff. At times, this aspires to be the Princess Bride of adventure games – just the good stuff, with highly polished mechanics abstracting all the inventory management details. Mindless but moderately compelling in the wee hours of the day.

The game has an interesting backstory:

This game was developed by a team of 3 brothers, Adam, Seth, and Sam Coster, after Sam was diagnosed with stage 4b Lymphoma (cancer of the lymph system) in late 2013. It's been the thing that kept Sam truly living during the cancer treatments, even when he relapsed in late early 2015 and had to go through two stem-cell transplants to kill the damn thing.