Retreat to Enen – Review
Human activity has produced and amplified climate change to an extent that its impacts can no longer be ignored. The future of humanity is in jeopardy as radical changes beyond those caused by natural variations have begun to wreak devastation on every continent. The best that can be hoped for, even with diligent, preventative action, is to prevent the worst-case scenario: the near or complete collapse of the global environment.
Pros:
- Gorgeous visuals
- Thoughtful premise and setting
- Relaxing gameplay flow
Cons:
- Overall loop can get a bit tiresome
- Hard ot navigate at times
Score – 7/10
The opening sequence of Retreat to Enen by Head West depicts a possible future in which excessive spending and a lack of foresight lead to the ignominious collapse of human society. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic wasteland, though (though that happened long ago). It seems like the Earth has recovered, with what’s left of humanity acknowledging its past faults and working to restore the vital balance between itself and the natural world.
Introspection leading to a game-changing change away from wasteful consumerism and toward conscientious sustainability is essential for such an objective. One way is through introspective meditation, a cornerstone of Retreat to Enen’s gameplay loop that periodically prompts you to take stock of your situation and contemplate. It’s a novel feature not seen in any other survival game, and it helps Enen highlight the conventions of the genre while drawing parallels between our real-world experiences and our virtual ones.
Outside of these parameters, though, Retreat to Enen struggles to be a mechanically compelling experience, instead provoking pointless frustrations that work against the game’s meditative ethos.
Retreat to Enen is set more than 2,550 years in the future and depicts a planet well on its way to healing. In theory, humans have learnt to live in harmony with their environment, taking only what they need to survive while taking on the role of stewards rather than parasites. To prove that you are worthy of being one of these guardians, you must first test your mettle in the wilderness, where you must learn to stay alive and consider your place in the world before returning with wisdom to pass on to others.
Enen, whose name is plainly a Biblical pun, is a realm of remarkable scenery spanning three biomes: the arid, subtropical island of Enen; the lush, forested area known as The Valley of the Giants; and the icy, mountainous regions of the Great North. Even while these locations are sometimes described as “visually rich,” they are strangely devoid of life on the scale expected from the light narrative framework, giving Retreat to Enen a palpable sense of loneliness.
A lone turkey gobbles as it darts through the woods or over the snow, a solitary deer wanders aimlessly through the underbrush, and a solitary fish glides through the water above a sea of swaying kelp and deadly anemones. Possible effort at doing so through the most environmental of environmental stories by not populating the earth with critters. Perhaps the Earth’s recovery has not progressed as far as thought. There is a noticeable discrepancy between the types of life these habitats should be able to support at this stage of Earth’s rejuvenation and the types of life they actually do support.
The act of killing and gathering the meat from these animals is a chore in and of itself, and it further separates the necessity of survival from the concept of stewardship. Some rabbits and boars are expert escapists, disappearing into the trees as soon as you spot them, not when they spot you; deer and iguanas are similarly hyperaware of your presence at all times, which may discourage you from hunting altogether. In spite of being top predators, wolves, bears, and snakes will attack you without warning if they encounter you in their natural habitat.
The spear animation makes thrusts shaky and inaccurate, and the lack of visual or audible hit markers for arrows renders distance strikes hollow and hard to trace, making hunting a tedious job fraught with frustration and missed opportunities. These traps and nets will not catch anything no matter how long you leave them out or where you set them (at least over 12 hours of play, in my experience).
Some animals supply only meat, while others provide only pelts, further complicating the game’s existential ambiguity; if a hunting system must be included, it would have been more realistic and preferable if each animal dropped several components when brought down. As a token of respect consistent with the game’s themes, every part of the animal should be employed in some crafting component. There is a disconnect between the intended message and the game’s mechanics when you can’t break down trees or dig holes but may kill an animal and discard most of its body.
Gathering is an important activity in Retreat to Enen, right up there with hunting. You’ll be picking up anything from sticks and rocks and clay blocks to tubers and fungi and herbs used in medicine. In addition, mining is an option, though not in the same way as in most survival games. The ores and diamonds you seek are not distributed in veins flowing through the ground or across escarpments; rather, they are clustered atop rocks and cliffs, which you will dismantle using the same futuristic Quantum Control skill you use to hunt down and kill creatures.
Mats are used in a wide variety of subsystems, including crafting things, building structures, cooking food, and brewing medical tonics.
The game’s user interfaces are incredibly obtuse and hard to comprehend due to excessively transparent backdrops and tiny lettering. Not everyone has perfect vision, and although it’s good to be able to add or remove predators or disable the HUD, it would be even nicer if there were choices to make menus more transparent and text larger for everyone.
Many of the promotional materials for the game show large, carefully constructed camps, but in practise, the building outlines jitter and flip about wildly as you try to put them, making it difficult to build even a single structure. The majority of the components needed to construct houses and other complex goods are hidden until the end of the second biome, long after the tedious process of methodically gathering materials or accomplishing practically anything else has likely fallen into tedium.
A peculiar variation from the standard survival formula is the inability to cook individual items, such as meat, over a campfire. Unfortunately, once a meal has been prepared, it cannot be added to the inventory. When you can make and then carry antiseptic and anti-venom with you anywhere, curing parasite infections or snake bites while adventuring, it seems like a strange decision to rely on fruits, veggies, and smoked meats when you’re away from your campfire cooking pot.
However, difficulties might also be encountered during investigation. Retreat to Enen does not provide players with a map or compass, testing their navigation and memorising skills to the limit. Given the high-tech capabilities of your suit—which can, for example, create structures out of holograms or make a thin blue film appear over a dead animal’s body—the lack of these basic navigational aids seems inexplicable.
It’s true that you can set up waypoints by planting navigational flags, but making them requires a flower unique to the first biome. It’s more efficient to take note of landmarks and move on to the next target than to spend a lot of time hunting for them or cultivating them in planters (Retreat to Enen’s barebones farming system that barely counts as farming).
Spirit plays a significant role in Retreat to Enen because it serves as a constant reminder that our choices have repercussions. Quantum Control operations, such as mining and harvesting, deplete Spirit over time, and this metric is managed alongside hunger, thirst, health, and temperature. It’s an intriguing idea, and one that has a direct bearing on the overarching themes of Retreat to Enen. In practise, though, it’s readily defeated by turning on Quantum Control, performing the desired action, and then swiftly turning it off again before the feature’s official release. There isn’t much to that realisation if you let it affect you.
You must travel to meditation locations in all of the biomes as your Spirit depletes and refill it. Following on-screen prompts to inhale and exhale, you can rest and think about the world outside of the game in these cerulean geodesic domes, offering a relaxing experience not typically available in video games. In addition, three secret Arcadian ruins are concealed in each biome and must be located in order to get access to new crafting and construction recipes and new biomes.
There are also gold meditation domes there, where a soothing voice leads you through mindfulness exercises. These tether you to the game and the real world in the same way that mental health apps like Calm do. If you put on some headphones and close your eyes, the peaceful sounds of Enen’s biomes will help you relax and unwind. You’ll feel more centred and cognizant of your impact on the world around you.
It’s a shame, then, that these golden domes vanish after being utilised and can’t be re-visited until a new game is started, and that the routine of accomplishing everything else quickly erases any sense of serenity.
There’s a lot of meaning in the fact that we’ve retreated to Enen from the world. We are stewards who, should we perish completely, must do everything we can to protect our one and only home in this vast, nearly unlimited universe. It is incumbent upon us to figure out how to live in harmony with the local ecosystems without causing any irreparable harm, and to teach this lesson to the next generation. That’s why Enen isn’t a digital or physical location, but rather, a metaphor for the inner spiritual realm we all possess.
Retreat to Enen is an admirable attempt to convey such a weighty idea in a relatively compact medium. The message encourages us to slow down, take a deep breath, and relax so that we can assess our surroundings more objectively and make better judgments as a result. The central message is unfortunately muddled by contradictory and subjective views on sustainability, and the lacklustre survival mechanics and systems that get in the way make it difficult to recommend a retreat to Enen, especially when compared to apps like Calm, which already provide easily accessible spaces for meditation and reflection.
