Developer: Deli Interactive LLC
Publisher: Grafitti Games
Release Date: 04/08/2022
Price: £15.49 / $19.99
Review Copy Provided By Grafitti Games
Introducing: Camp Canyonwood Review
It’s time for summer camp and you just landed a job at Camp Canyonwood. Once you design yourself, you’re dropped into a fairly freeform seven days as you try to keep your campers alive, happy, and more importantly, learning! If all goes well, you send the little buggers home better than they arrived and get paid for your troubles. Or, you could be sending them home in a box. Or a bag. Or just a snapshot because they were snatched by aliens in the middle of the night. All of this and more can make your summer one of the most memorable ones yet! The game is in early development, but thanks to Steam’s Early Access system, you can play it today! But the real question is, is it worth spending time at camp or should you just stay home?
We have a pool and a pond
The big concept here is freedom of choice. You can live your summer the way you want to as long as you keep your campers happy and alive. As such, in the spirit of games like Minecraft, the story sort of unfolds through your adventures in the world and not pre-scripted events. You are assisted by the director and four staff members, each offering different services to you and your campers. Among the people you meet, I have to call attention to the fact that one of the staff named Wick is non-binary and the character creator lets you set pronouns. Always glad to see these options in games!
The range of different things that can happen to you and your campers is one of the stronger points of the title. Snakes, Bears, and Aliens are only a few of the dangers out there. When these events hit, they really give the game a jolt of much-needed excitement. This is very much a slow-burn life-sim-style game taking place over many consecutive summers, each consisting of 7 days. If you keep everyone alive, you’ll see them again next summer.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left.
Unfortunately, other than player freedom, the game itself is shackled with rather clunky gameplay and a very basic UI. It’s a 2D hand-crafted world, but on a 3D plane (Think Don’t Starve) and each active element is highlighted when you get close. You can sort of influence your four campers to do tasks. The task are varied and each requires a different tool. The skills include things like chopping wood, fishing, foraging, and other camping appropriate skills, but if any of the camper’s needs aren’t high, they simply aren’t going to stick to the tasks. I often found it easier to just do it myself and let them do whatever they wanted to, but that quickly runs the stamina down and you end up ending the day at noon. It’s a common enough problem with these types of games, but the novelty of having your campers do it for you wears thin when they don’t stick to doing anything for more than a few seconds.
You will randomly get the other staff making requests like donating food or wood to various projects and improvements, but this felt very uneven. If cutting an entire tree down costs me a third of my stamina but nets me only 3 wood, asking me to donate 20 is fairly steep. The game is early access so some of this may change over time, so here’s hoping some of these balance issues are addressed.
You’re not being the ball, Danny.
There’s no way to politely say it, but I hate the art style. Just looking at it makes me anxious. It’s got a very jittery feeling and everything has Constant Movement. It’s very bouncy and more distracting than anything else. The animations on things like cutting trees and fishing are very rough, and I get that it’s a style choice, but it ends up feeling as awkward as it looks.
Similarly, the audio doesn’t do the game any favors. Most of the voices are supposed to be squawky and bird-sounding, but since it’s just noises while you read text, some of them are very harsh. The music isn’t as bad, but it’s just very banjo/string-heavy, backwoods, camping music so your tolerance of it may vary. It was nowhere near as problematic as the director’s ear-splitting caw!
Hey, that kangaroo just took my ball.
For an early access title, it’s surprisingly bug-free. There were some minor graphical issues, particularly things behind buildings showing up when they shouldn’t have, but otherwise, I ran into very few issues. I think most of the focus going forward needs to be on balance and looking a bit harder in the Effort <-> Reward system. These games are designed to be grindy, but there’s a point of no return where it’s no longer Zen-Gameplay, and it crosses over into just annoying. The controls and feel/heft of some of the actions could use some tweaks as well, but that may be down to my personal choice versus developer design choice.
There are problems with the game, but none of them are in the foundations or stability. I actually loved the fact that I could run the game in a medium-sized window and access my TV/Podcast app on the same desktop. I’m not saying it should be a mobile game, but it scales very well on a large desktop.
Conclusion
All in all, I found it very hard to get lost in this campground. It had cute moments and the characters have some charm, but even as an early access title, I have to review it as it stands. Right now the game feels very hollow and it feels like you run out of things to do very quickly with very little prompting. It’s somewhere between a survival game and a village sim, but neither side feels fleshed out. It may be worth keeping an eye on as development continues, but as of today, I just really can’t say it’s much fun.
PROS
- The music is well done and works for the setting
- The game itself is very stable
CONS
- Gameplay can feel clunky and unfocused
- Vocalizations from most of the birds are migraine-inducing
- Jittery hand-drawn graphics left me feeling itchy
Verdict
Random, open-ish world could work and the idea behind the game is solid, but this early access title just needs a little more time in the oven before it’s ready to be served.
