“The Oregon Trail” game was designed as a learning tool to teach children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail which is an emigration route from Missouri to Oregon. In the original game, you owned a wagon pulled by oxen and were tasked with keeping your party healthy and managing basic resources and reacted to random events.
Organ Trail is a parody of this game and instead, you make the journey by car, trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse. You have to maintain the health of your party and make sure you keep a good supply of resources, such as enough food, fuel, and car parts to maintain your vehicle. Graphically, it looks like the original Apple II game which means the graphics are primitive and have limited colour.
You see your car progressing along, and have access to a few menus which display your party status, progress, fuel and food levels. On the road, you can do most of the things you can at the landmarks. So you can rest, repair your car, trade, scavenge etc. but can't purchase from shops.
Your party has a leader who is treated separately from other members, if your leader dies, it is game over, but party members can be lost. Resting or using medikits heals your members, but the leader can only be healed with medikits.
Repairing the car uses scrap, and the more scrap you use, the higher percentage chance to repair your vehicle. Failing to repair wastes the scrap and an hour so is a gamble.
Trading is random to what passers-by offer; sometimes it can be a rip-off, other times is major beneficial.
Scavenge plays out like a mini game. You walk around in a square area and zombies enter from the sides. You have to click and drag back to shoot which is a bit cumbersome; but I think that's the point. About 3 items will spawn on the map for you to collect which can be food, money or scrap. You will need to scavenge a lot to keep up supplies because money is limited. If you get hit by the zombie, the scavenge ends and your leader takes a hit to his life.
When you reach settlements you can purchase items from the shop which varies in price and can be extremely pricey. Its always worth stopping at the shops to grab a decent price whilst you can. You can also get car upgrades which lessen the chance of things breaking, or combat upgrades which help on the scavenge.
There are loads of random events which happen, some which can be good but they are usually bad news. Non-interactive events can occur like your members getting ill, items being stolen, and items lost. There are some interactive moments too like finding graves which can have items, or a zombie which you have to shoot on a side-on view. You can also meet strange people and have some options how to react which can have positive, negative, or neutral consequences. When leaving cities, you may have to sneak past a horde (which is like the river crossings in Oregon Trail), or may get chased by a gang, where you have to knock them off their bikes.
Since it is a zombie survival type game, you would expect to be bitten a lot, but this is a rare and random occurrence. You would also expect that resting outside would come at a great risk, but there is no risk whatsoever which detracts from the zombie survival experience.
In addition to the main game, there is an Endless Mode which obviously goes on for as long as you stay alive, and playing this mode unlocks different load-outs to provide a slightly different challenge.
Although Organ Trail's game-play is limited and mainly based on random numbers, it is surprisingly fun. It is good to pick up and play on occasions, although after several plays, it does start to become a chore.
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Definition of an experience that's better in theory than in practice. Combat controls actively antagonize the player and turn scavenging and defending bases into a frustrating chore as opposed to a tense thrill. The writing isn't as sharp or witty as the game seems to think it is, and even after just a couple playthroughs I felt I'd experienced everything the game had to offer. There's a great foundation here for something that desperately needs more variety and usability.
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