P.A.M.E.L.A. is an open world survival horror FPS where you play as a “Sleeper” who awakens from cryo-sleep in the utopian city of Eden. However, the city has been infected by a disease that has left its denizens disfigured, unpredictable, and hostile. The Sleeper must scavenge for supplies to survive in this once thriving city, and build a base to protect themselves from their surroundings. Eden is separated into many different sections and the NPC’s have factions that will affect how they interact with the player and other NPC’s.
DISCLAIMER: This game is currently in Early Access and the devs are working very hard on it, this review may not be a proper reflection of the final game and should only be used as a reference of where it is at the time of posting (PAMELA V0.4.0.4).
P.A.M.E.L.A. is an open world survival horror FPS where you play as a “Sleeper” who awakens from cryo-sleep in the utopian city of Eden. However, the city has been infected by a disease that has left its denizens disfigured, unpredictable, and hostile. The Sleeper must scavenge for supplies to survive in this once thriving city, and build a base to protect themselves from their surroundings. Eden is separated into many different sections and the NPC’s have factions that will affect how they interact with the player and other NPC’s.
This game does not hold your hand at all, it doesn’t even acknowledge your hand, it doesn’t even acknowledge that you exist and you might have a hand that may need holding. You are dropped into the world and told some exposition by the AI overlord of Eden, P.A.M.E.L.A. and then you are taught a couple mechanical features of the game (scanning containers, hacking, combat), but other than that you have no direction at all. There are a couple of things scattered throughout Eden that illuminates the story of Eden’s fall but the story is pretty much non-existent. It is all survival. Which is fine, many games have thrived off of the “do your own thing and figure it out model,” but I feel P.A.M.E.L.A. has a lot more depth than most of those games and the learning curve is very steep because of that. If you don’t want to spend hours running around aimlessly, picking up resources only to die at nightfall because you didn’t know what or how to build, you are going to have to look for help outside of the game (YouTube videos, wikis, etc.). That’s not to say you won’t eventually figure some stuff out on your own, but I found it way too frustrating in the beginning before you have a base and a weapon because you will die a lot.
Which brings me to my next point; Combat is clunky, frustrating, and not fun. It mostly consists of melee attacks, however, there are some ranged weapons. I felt that combat was more of a hassle than anything, you can easily outrun most enemies so I would find myself 9 times out of 10 just running away rather than spending 30 seconds throwing punches that don’t connect for some reason and blocking attacks that end up hitting me anyway. Seeing as this is a survival game, and there’s nothing else to do but build to get better weapons to make combat easier, the combat should at least be fun and something you actually want to do. Some of the AI is really bad as well, there are security bots that if an alarm is tripped (via hacking) it seems that they will try to walk directly to where the alarm went off, regardless of what is in the way. So, I would be running through hallways and see security bots perpetually walking into a wall.
The upside of P.A.M.E.L.A. is that it is aesthetically pleasing to navigate. The world is a run-down futuristic utopia and each area is unique and adds character to the city. You can really feel the emptiness of what once was a bustling, thriving city. That makes the survival horror aspect of the game more terrifying because of the infected popping up out of nowhere when you are just trying to enjoy your surroundings.
As I said in the disclaimer P.A.M.E.L.A. is still in its early stages and most of the problems I have with the game have been specifically addressed in their developer timeline. The dev’s have also made massive leaps even in just this last patch alone, so you can really tell they are listening to the community feedback and dedicated to producing a great game. I look forward to seeing how P.A.M.E.L.A. turns out when it’s all said and done, but in its current state, I don’t think I would recommend it.
