Wilderless Reviews

A cute and relaxing walking simulator type game where you can just aimlessly explore a generated fantasy world. The game is in an early state and it shows in the funky animations, graphics, and collision detection, but I also see plenty of promise. My main gripes so far are with the UI, which feels optimised for mobile touch controls rather than mouse and keyboard. Overall, it's the kind of game you jump into when you don't want to use your tired head at the end of a long day and just want to chill, and I really like that.

The game is described as: "Explore a Massive Procedurally Generated Open World Wilderness." Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much of the "explore" part in it. The procedurally generated open world is indeed present, and the terrain generation works quite well. Exploring the world could have been interesting, but the keyboard-and-mouse controls, along with the HUD, are so poorly implemented that it’s impossible to engage with the experience. As a result, it’s hard to treat Wilderness as a proper game. [olist] [*]The camera has strange, restrictive movement. [*]In bird flight mode, turning is jerky, and moving forward requires spamming the Space key, which is far from smooth. [*]On-screen buttons frequently fail to respond to clicks. [*]The interface sometimes switches to what seems to be a touch-screen layout, caused Esc and other inputs unresponsive and forcing me to quit with Alt+F4. [*]The game runs poorly on my RTX 3060 even on low graphics settings. [/olist] This is not a game—it’s a project showcasing the creator’s procedural generation skills. However, due to the major issues with camera and controls, the promised "go anywhere, anytime" experience is out of reach, so I have to leave a negative review. I was left with a strong feeling that the game is mocking me—offering a beautiful world while deliberately preventing me from exploring it with what feels like intentionally broken controls.

a little buggy but a beautiful relaxing game of casual exploration