Miasmata opens by dropping you onto a forest island with nothing but a watch, a compass, a notebook, and the plague. Your goal is to synthesize a cure using plants and fungi found on the island, but first you need to figure out how to stay alive and find your way around.
Unlike the raft of wilderness survival sandbox sims it resembles, Miasmata is a goal-oriented game focused on a few core mechanics. It tries to capture the experience of hiking around in rough terrain and camping out in the Minnesota backwoods, without asking you to build an entire village out of lashed sticks. And despite a laundry list of flaws that drag it down, it often delivers brilliantly on that core promise.
The main survival challenge is managing fever, which clouds your vision and eventually causes you to keel over and die. Fever is incurred by dehydration, drowning, and, more than anything, tripping and falling. Perhaps the game’s biggest innovation, Miasmata’s momentum system is unique and compelling, imbuing the island’s terrain with an unforgiving physicality. The system is at its best when you’re climbing steep slopes--the rhythm and pace of hoisting your weight up a rocky incline is captured exquisitely. But it’s often at its worst, scant on sound cues to indicate your speed and momentum, and oversensitive to tripping on the smallest changes in elevation.
Nighttime in Miasmata is impressively, blindingly dark. Wandering around in the dark is dangerous; you’re constantly tiptoeing lest you fall off a cliff or stumble into a pond. It’s so dark that you’ll find yourself groping around, utterly lost, just meters outside your tent, an experience strongly reminiscent of my own childhood experiences camping in the Midwest. It’s a testament to the skill of Miasmata’s designers, Joe and Bob Johnson, that they could capture such feelings so well in game design.
Falling down hills also causes you to drop anything you were carrying, which recreated another life experience--a particularly frustrating one I never expected to deal with in a videogame: crouching on the ground, searching desperately for a small item dropped in the grass.
The game isn’t challenging, but the unforgiving fall damage provides a gentle but firm incentive to behave responsibly: stock up on antibiotics, maintain a responsible sleep schedule, stay hydrated, and stay close to known landmarks. The imprecise controls make the map’s detailed topographical contour lines a tool to mitigate risk, not just a decorative touch. But the map is obscured by default, and must be unlocked in small chunks, which can be a chore. You need to triangulate your position by pointing at known landmarks, and the system is bizarrely pixel-perfect. Your character can distinguish a single statue from a dozen identical statues even if it’s hundreds of meters away, as long as you aim the crosshair through a gap in the leaves, but can’t remember topographical features or particular naturally occurring rocks.
On the other hand, the inherent difficulty of mapping the island just means you’ll get lost more often, and Miasmata is at its best when you’re lost. It forces you to pay attention to the shape of the land and minor differences in flora to get your bearings, or just give up and wander at random until you find a tent--both are rewarding strategies at various points in the game.
The wilderness is overlaid with scraps of a Lovecraftian turn-of-the-20th-century backstory, with mysterious ruins, cryptic notes, bloody corpses, and an invulnerable monster. While these are occasionally effective, they rarely deliver much of a punch, and fail to cohere into anything larger. The best moment is an artist’s cottage, full of vivid and colorful portraits of a symbol you only later realize is the face of the monster haunting the island. Most of the cryptic story concerns your country of origin, where the plague has incited a paranoid backlash against the scientific community and helped a demagogue rise to power. None of it meaningfully informs the gameplay experience, nor does it do much to spice up the rather bland ruins littering the island.
The island itself is quite wonderful, however; full of lakes and pools, and beautiful in its restraint from showy ostentation. It’s no Witcher 3, but its lighting and weather depictions are gorgeous, and its eye for environmental detail is noteworthy for a game of its scope. It’s full of unique leaf litter, stones, insects, birds and mammals and, especially, plants. They’re not always pretty, but Miasmata offers dozens of humble plants, which clue you in to subtle environmental variation around the island. On the other hand, many of the plot-crucial plants are big and flashy--like giant flytraps and corpse flowers--and feel out of place with the game’s toned-down aesthetic.
Plants and fungi also provide the game’s crafting mechanic: extracting medicinal biomolecules and synthesizing performance-enhancing pills and tonics. The player character understands enough biochemistry to study new plants, but all the real science was done by the refugee scientists whose bodies are scattered around the island. There is very little exploration, creativity, or critical thought involved in the crafting mechanic.
Nor does plant hunting have as much depth as it aspires to. A few notes describe the environments where certain plants like to grow: “the East facing side of trees,” or “in places with morning shade and afternoon sun.” The environments aren’t quite small or distinct enough for this kind of ecological scavenger hunting to be practical, though, and instead, every important plant is found using map scraps found throughout the game. Ultimately, plants function more as maguffins to send you all over the island than the basis of a meaningful crafting or botany experience.
Miasmata is quite rough around the edges and narratively flimsy, to the extent that it at times feels like an early build of a better game. And at around 12 hours to complete, it’s a few hours too long for the learning curve of its mechanics. But the core ideas are executed well enough to make it a more than worthwhile play, especially for those interested in the survival genre or wilderness in games. It powerfully conveys the wilderness experiences that inspired it, and in that sense it’s an artistic success despite its imperfections.