Camped Out! Review

What is your favourite thing about camping? From my youth, it was waking up on frosty mornings and looking over an alien landscape of ice and chilly Tasmanian trees. The part I don’t remember quite as distinctly is that intense rush of getting your tent set up before a bear mauls you to death. Thankfully, Camped Out! is here to fill the gap in my memory.

Imagine my surprise when I discover the depth of this quaint little river is close to ‘extreme’

Take to your campsite, empty out your rucksacks and start settling in. You’ll be lopping lumber, smashing stones and finally filling bellies before you turn in for the night. Each campsite has its own majestic wonder to explore, and unique quirks to yell rude words at. The Camped Out! experience feels a great deal like Overcooked, only you are cooking the same dish every game and the kitchen becomes more and more perilous. Also, there are bears and other assorted woodland arseholes ruining your flow.

Each and every challenge starts with your character knee deep in tools and assorted camping garbage, before you need to locate and gather resources to finalise set up for things like your tent and campfire. Easy in theory, but once you need to start navigating water wheels and elevators to grab stones and wood, or dodging instant-kill ghosts while catching fish – that’s when things heat up a great deal. With up to four players available to play, you’d wonder what masochist would want extra bodies in this chaos simulation.

I question the sanity of camping alongside two working mining elevators

At least, that is how I felt after a dozen or so campsites. Initially I revelled in the solo experience, glad to see the developers had been careful to make sure a couch co-op title such as this didn’t have the entire arse-end fall off when you played alone – but after realising the true potential of YEETING items across gaps and maps, I wondered if having a willing recipient would be more beneficial to me. After half a dozen failures, I conscripted my wife and we set to work.

Now, with other players in the game you realise that the format shifts a little bit. Tools need to be shared, and new items – such as a medkit to revive others – become a mainstay. Those deadly ghosts can now struggle to claim a victim, if you are quick enough to mash the first aid kit to the appropriate forehead. But the new advantage of ‘divide and conquer’ gameplay is a breath of fresh mountain air. Now you just need to conquer the game itself.

Think bears are tough? Try some ghosts

When you have your eye in, you can slam through your objectives with relative ease – but once a tide of squirrels are stealing your stuff, and on screen indicators for grabbing items are frustratingly absent, you start to grind your teeth. Then, the telltale growl of a bear and you might as well just hit pause and restart the level. The game has a tight set of controls and a simplistic order of operations – but unfortunately these do not always function as intended. I had to stop playing the game in the presence of my daughter after I kept feeling f-bombs wanting to sneak out as I desperately tried to grab a rock for the firepit, only to see the white silhouette refuse to appear as it idly rolled at my feet. And don’t even ask me about how everything in the game functions as a proper physics-based object within the world – seeing my pickaxe go soaring into a ravine because I dropped it on the side of my tent and it decided to zoom away from me is enough to make my eyes roll cleanly out of my head.

But this did not alienate me to the point of not enjoying the game. The title is cleanly made to deliver an experience, and that experience is a ton of fun. Admittedly I may have been exceptionally lucky that the random nature of the less enjoyable facets of the game didn’t cross my path too aggressively, but I am aware that others may find the more sticky end of the camping stick. The aesthetics and presentation of the game were quick to draw me in, with snappy visuals and whimsical music convincing me to keep on trying long after I was ready to give up. Part of that may be attributed to the Ducktales font that would print SUCCESS on the screen when I nailed a campsite – but realistically I will also pay big props to the CASUAL difficulty mode within the game, which reduces the amount of resources needed to set up camp. I’d almost argue it should be the base difficulty for the game, with the normal difficulty getting a rebrand to something more akin to CHALLENGING.

I am 90% sure the junior woodchuck guidebook advises against standing on running water wheels

Final Thoughts

I see Camped Out! as a game with a hell of a lot of ambition that doesn’t quite nail the brief. It may rub shoulders with couch co-op alumni such as Overcooked or Moving Out, but under scrutiny it doesn’t get its name in the same list of must-play party titles to ruin friendships. It’s still a fun and frenetic title – perhaps best suited to those that are ready to cut their teeth away from couches and kitchens.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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