Vein

Vein is a post-apocalyptic survival multiplayer sandbox game. Gather supplies to survive, explore abandoned buildings, combat bandits, defend your home, and rebuild society with friends.

Game Details

Developer: Ramjet Studios
Platforms: Steam
Link: Website, FAQ, Discord
Release Date: TBA
Status: Under development but available as a consistently updated demo currently.

Features

• As time passes and seasons change, the world of Vein does too. Persistent, long-scale random events affect gameplay in this dynamic environment.
• AI can see, hear, feel, and smell you, and react intelligently to those senses. You’re being watched. Terrifying zombie variants make survival that much more difficult.
• From your hair to your body type to your stats, you can customize your character and make them truly unique among the survivors.
• You can interact with nearly everything you can see. Open mailboxes, adjust faucets, and knock on doors. Throw a can of beans at a zombie if you like.
• Build over the destroyed world and establish safe-houses. Defend yourself from raiders and invasions. Maintain your base by yourself or with friends.
• Hunt, fish, and trap. Till land and grow your own food. Chop your own wood. Once canned goods run out, you’re on your own.
• Get around the world of Vein with cars and trucks. Refuel and maintain your vehicle. Upgrade parts to repair damage and improve performance.
• There’s a pretty ambitious/impressive list of planned features listed on their website, so be sure to check that out.

Visuals

Game Bytes:

• The game is set in Champlain Valley, NY. Which is notable to me because I’m from NY! But also it’s nice to see an actual specific area as opposed to “generic forest/island which has all sorts of random plant/wildlife that make no sense”.
• According to the FAQ there is no advanced nutrition or health system- like SCUM- planned.
• While you can currently play the “demo” version of the game, it’s literally just the most recent iteration of the game. The developers plan to keep the game itself free until they feel it’s at a point where it’s justified/worth charging for it. At that point the demo will remain up but will no longer be updated.
• Vein is being developed by two developers who previously worked on Dead Matter. While a game or dev being linked to Dead Matter can be a bit of a touchy subject for some of the DM backers, the Vein developers are very transparent in their FAQ about their previous role/work with the other title.

My Thoughts- 9/18/2022

Overall I get incredibly strong “this feels like Survive the Nights” vibes from Vein. And that’s not a bad thing! I’m always a fan of the features/mechanics from one game making their way into other titles. Especially when the feature/mechanic is done well. For someone like me- being incredibly building challenged- having both STN and Vein focus on simply fortifying existing structures instead of building mansions is a welcome feature. I don’t mind the text based inventory system, though I know folks can have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it.

More than anything I think it’s a smart move by the developers to not be charging for the game at this time as an early access title. I’ve jumped in and out of it a bunch – and while I believe/hope that many of my issues with the game are things that will change with time & further development, there’s no guarantees. If you should check out the demo – which why not, it’s free- keep in mind that there is limited functionality in some aspects, missing animations, etc. Some of my initial gripes actually concern relatively basic shit that I’m sure will change over time; the footstep noise being off/weird, no sound for looting, a really loud AND annoying clack sound in some menus- like doing the crafting.

To me the game just feels very stiff and stilted. The movement of the player character, the movement of the zombie AI. As you move around the beautiful scenery your interaction with things – looting, movement, etc- just feels incredibly stiff. No fluidity. The AI themselves are pretty basic zombie models that can mostly easily be killed by stepping in to swing, stepping out, and stepping back again. Though they did recently give them the ability to climb things, which is neat because it prevents them from being quite as useless as they were previously.

I think this is a good one to jump in and out of as the developers push development forward, just to see how things are shaping up/changing.