I played Desolate for an hour.
I started by playing through the prolog, which was… ok. The voice acting was a bit stilted, but otherwise serviceable. There was one hiccup, when I didn’t realize the item I needed was right next to me, and I backtracked quite a distance looking for it. Figured it out on the second attempt, but a bit more telegraphing would have helped.
Once I was in the game, I had a hell of a time. Stealth is clearly a focus of this game, which is cool, but if you fail the stealth, you waste precious resources on surviving fights. I played on normal, which is likely a bad call here, but I felt that autohealing wasn’t in the spirit of the game. I made it to within sight of the Movie Theater (the second story checkpoint) with 1 death during my hour of play. Most of that was spent running and hiding from monsters between the bunker, the lighthouse and the movie theater.
I could imagine this game being fun with friends, or maybe if I was more in the mood for such games, but crafting & rpg mechanics are not what I’m often looking for in these sorts of games.
Desolate gets an Uninstall from me, but maybe it’ll be more up someone elses alley.