Once Human review: waiter, there’s some brilliant creature design in my big bland survival soup

Haunted fridges buy you a lot of goodwill, honestly

So I’ve just hopped on my motorbike, enjoying one of several pleasingly incongruent classical musical tracks that plays from the radio, on my way to tick tasks off a list in the top right corner of my screen by scavenging an abandoned hospital. It’s a great hospital, by the way. Spotlight-headed phantasma shamble about corridors reminiscent of The Division 2 or The Last Of Us’s naturalia.

Striking, but also within easy reach of comparisons. And if Once Human was purely the collection of x from ys it very much appears to be, I’m not sure I’d have much positive to say about it. On the surface, what you're getting here is a 6/10 third-person shooter from ten years ago that gleefully spills thumbtacks along any simple paths to progress with live service obfuscation, propped up by a detached crafting and building economy that has you popping mined rocks and chopped wood in the oven then taking out freshly baked shotguns a few minutes later. Its systems run the gamut from numbly enjoyable to being a source of major psychic damage, and even the simple act of replacing your initial tier I rustic baseball cap means navigating several menus, currencies, and resources.

But, look. I’m on the way back from the hospital when I notice a small robot furiously drubbing the road with a pick so fast that its blocky head vibrates, and so rapidly I can’t work out if it’s a glitch or not. I jump off my motorbike and interact with it. My character pats the robots head, after which it disappears. I’ll find out what this robot’s deal is a few hours later, and while it kills the mystery for me, that initial encounter serves to prime my tired eyes for enough additional oddness and creativity that I can’t help kind of liking Once Human, even if I never plan to play it again.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio

I kill my first boss solo, but there’s a team gathering menu accessible beforehand where you can rope in temporary allies like a Destiny strike. The boss itself is a giant idiot, a lumpen mass of tissue and metal. It fires angrily at me with a gatling gun fused to its flesh, and when it stops to reload I stroll out of cover, pop off a few shots, and repeat these moves until I win. As a reward, I get a yellow slime with googly eyes I take back to my base and pop in a little containment facility, after which I can deploy it during fights as a big slimy barricade I can duck behind, still with the googly eyes. Travelling around after the boss, I encounter a giant six-legged bus that shimmers with phantasmagorical light. I climb inside of it and my yellow gel friend and I take in the sights as it shambles around the map.

I… god, I’m so sorry. I… think you should play this game?

It’s not good. I need to make that clear. But it’s got a strange sort of soul and even a little sinew, even if they're both shrouded in a lingering distrust that the player will appreciate them if they aren’t dolled out as rewards for feverishly studying its moth-eaten stacks of proprietaries like a tormented librarian.

Don’t play it if you’ve got literally anything else on, either. The first few hours are a certifiable shite saga. After floating down from the sky on a talking purple bird it takes me twenty minutes to find somewhere to set up my base that isn’t already occupied by another player, after which I’m bombarded by menus seemingly meant to nuke my willpower into a submissive fugue of sunk cost. Open the function wheel, then select Cradle to enter the Memetic screen. Open the Memetic screens and unlock the Disassembly Bench under the Gathering type. Open my skull with a large can opener.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio

Getting my first gun involves a crafting pipeline obnoxious enough to inspire eco-saboteurs. Furnace. Charcoal. Ingots. Disassembly bench. Scrap. Need more scrap. I’m given a map marker then sprint for three solid minutes to get there. Open some chests. Shoot one (1) zombie. Teleport back to my territory. I start working my way up the crafting tree to build a shotgun. At one point, I need to craft 30 or so charcoal from wood. It takes 30 seconds. I wait. Copper ingot next. It’ll take two minutes. Suppose I better click on some rocks, then.

But you like clicking on rocks, says Once Human, or you wouldn’t be here. I’ve been known to enjoy a pickaxe in my time, sure. But only, really, when this stuff works towards breathing danger and texture into both fictional destinations and your place within their ecosystem. But there’s something distinctly bolted-on about the survival and crafting here. Absent are the joys of employing necessary resourcefulness in a harsh environment, of mastering an ecoystem like, say, a Green Hell. Neither is there that final tying of the knot, of looping back survival demands into that ritual of crawling back home bruised and parched after a harsh excursion, and how it plays into the rhythms and routines of existing in a new world. The landscape feels like a lobby, even if the UX didn’t feel actively hostile to the idea you might accidentally forget you’re engaging with a product first, world second.

And yet…

Players can leave little buds with messages on for each other. I find one early that reads “Welcome to the unknown. We love it here.” It takes a while to sink in because, honestly, there’s very little unknown about the lake-tree-rock-hill repetition of the landscape surrounding my little patch of territory. But I keep playing and exploring the world, dotted with level-suggestions and mini-dungeons and friendly outposts. Eventually, I start noticing things. Painted murals of cartoon bears in the ruins of bedrooms. Scuttling purple oddities wearing hazard containment tarpaulin like kids dressed as halloween ghosts. Haunted fridges. Corpses stuck in place by a sort of amber-hued bile.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio

I start to learn what my favourite activities are. Poaching deer on my neighbours lands with an SMG. Shoulder barging zombies with one of a handful of really quite gratifying melee animations that elevate otherwise weightless combat. Driving around on my bike scouting out new weird creatures. One is a scarecrow. A scarecrow! I’m convinced that the more I learn about how this game actually functions the less intrigued I’m going to be by it all, but I’m left appreciative and also a bit sad. There’s some real artistry locked behind this cage.

Sometimes, games are all about finding our own personal happy place within their many systems. My other favourite activity in Once Human is that thing where you press each of the WASD keys in quick succession so your character moves in perfect circles. I often did this while I was waiting for items to craft. I highly recommend it, but although Once Human is free, is it a 50gb download, and I suspect you might already have something in your library that lets you do this.

I dearly hope the creature designers and whoever was responsible for the more dense environmental locations get to work on a project that’s confident enough to charge upfront, so that everything good about their work doesn’t have to be doled out piecemeal to support such an obtuse and elaborate live service. Ditto a crafting and building system that feels so detached from everything else I can't take it as anything but trend-chasing.

It all ends up feeling like someone pushed a cult classic console gem through a shredder and filled in the space between the strips with silica gel and sausage rusk and self-assessment forms. But its saving grace lies in the fact that it doesn’t feel cynical as much as it feels adherent, almost like its trapped under a pile of norms and necessaries needed for it to exist in the first place. Maybe you'll fancy enduring long enough to find the places where it pokes its curious little head out from under that rubble. The little robot was for mining ore, by the way, so it might help.