Overland is a turn-based survival game. You care for a group of post-apocalyptic travelers who are on a road trip across the USA. The developer is a small Michigan-based indie game studio
Finji.
The game is currently in First Access. Over the last 3 years, there were several waves of First Access offers, granting early access to the game.
Overland will be released on
September 19th, 2019. It will be available DRM-free on
Itch.io and GOG. It will be on
Steam, of course, as well as on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
You start the game with two survivers, a car and a few units of gasoline. A survivor can be either a human or a dog, each of them with random perks. At each location, you face aliens that threaten the lives of your team, while they try to loot the place or invite new friends.
These locations are played in turn-based mode. Each of your team members has two actions points, which can be used either for moving around or doing things, like looting or attacking. Your goal is to escape the place with as many of your team members as possible, while grabbing as much gasoline or other loot as possible.
Gasoline is the most important resource in the game. Make sure to always have some. If you run out of gas, the game gives you an extra hard map to play, where you have to refill your car.
The time of day cycles from location to location. You should keep an eye on that. Visiting high-risk areas at night can be very dangerous when you don't have a light source.
After escaping a location successfully, your team drives to a resting place. There you are shown a map, where you decide which location to visit next. The game gives you various options to pick from: places where a lot of gasoline is promised, or "useful items", maybe there were rumors of a new car or other survivors. You can even find camping sites, where people are willing to trade with you.
The art style is simplistic yet pleasant. It creates a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, which is supported very well by the sound effects. I don't know whether Overland will get a soundtrack at release, but I sure hope so.
Overland has a nice Twitch integration, which makes it interesting for streamers. If activated, it picks random names from chat for newly met characters ingame. When one of the chosen viewers speaks up in chat, you'll even see a speech bubble ingame. This is a really cool feature, but I miss an option here to blacklist the names of chatbots.
Viewers also have the chance to vote about which location you visit next. However, the streamer is not bound to the vote. In my opinion, it's good that the streamer can decide against a vote when they feel they are being trolled.
The Linux distribution I've used to play Overland is
Manjaro Linux (Kernel 5.2.8) with
KDE Plasma desktop (version 5.16.4). My system has an AMD Ryzen 7 1700x CPU, 32 GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. I use Nvidias proprietary drivers (version 430.40).
I've played the Overland First Access build 375, which was released in March 2019. So I expect the final version will come up with some news and surprises. The game has come a long way since I played it for the first time three years ago. I can't wait to play the release version!
Hatnix (aka The King of Linux Gaming) is a streamer, programmer, and long time Linux user. He is not just an expert Linux user, he is also a valuable educator in the community.
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