| Developers | Arclight Creations |
| Platforms | Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac operating systems |
| Released | April 21, 2020 |
| Genres | Adventure game, Strategy Video Game |
Introduction:
Help Will Come Tomorrow is a survival strategy game set during the October Revolution in Russia. You need to keep a group of train crash survivors alive in the Siberian wilderness long enough for them to be rescued, whilst avoiding the renegades in the woods who derailed your train and seemingly shot all survivors.
Gameplay:
The gameplay mainly revolves around maintaining your survivor’s status, hunger, exhaustion, exposure to the elements, and health. Typical survival game fair. Each character starts the day with up to 3 action points, which you can use to cook food, improve the camp structures, or just have a chat at the fire. You will also need to explore the surrounding
taiga to find essential resources and hunt animals, but take care to avoid the patrolling
renegades. At night you have the choice of two topics of conversation, where the outcomes of these discussions will have an impact on camp morale and relationships.
Difficulty levels:
There are three difficulty levels for the game. I will mostly be talking about the easy difficulty,
as this is what you probably want to play on if you’re looking for a relaxing experience. I’ve enjoyed my time on normal but it can be incredibly frustrating at times. Easy mode is a fun, relaxing experience. It’s possible to fail but there is less pressure on finding resources and your survivors are generally in a better state from the start so less likely to lose a limb to frostbite or just starve to death.
Normal difficulty is a real challenge and can easily end up in a death spiral as weakened characters can’t complete the actions needed to heal and soon everyone is dead. This can mean that one mistake or bit of back luck is all it takes to end your run which is incredibly frustrating when you can’t reload back a few days to try again. Overall it is a well-made, fairly well-balanced strategy game.
I like the visual style, the character artwork is very nice and doesn’t suffer from lacking any true animation. The music choices are very fitting for the setting and really build on the dramatic atmosphere.
Characters:
There is a good roster of characters. It seems like you will always start with both
Aleksei and Dmitri but there are many others to take the other two slots. They all have different traits which can make them particularly useful for one task, or just an overall liability. Each night you can learn a little more about their backstory and motivations as well as finding side-quests to look for other survivors or supplies that the characters left behind. There’s a lot of luck involved, even on easy difficulty.
A random event can cause a character to become injured and you can almost guarantee that you won’t have the specific upgrade to the health station that is needed. Your camp can be discovered by the renegades resulting in a game over very suddenly and when I won my first game it also felt very abrupt, which made it a little unsatisfying.
Translation:
The translation to English is a little variable. Some elements like the opening sequence and
some of the text on the user interface use the wrong word or just phrase things strangely. It’s not hard to understand the meaning but it’s a bit jarring since the majority is in perfect English. But next time I need to shift snow off a path I’m going to say I’m going to ‘unsnow’ it because we really could do with a word for that in English.
Conclusion:
Help Will Come Tomorrow is a fun experience, though it relies a little too much on luck to feel like you’re fully able to strategies and win or lose on your own merits. I’d recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed similar games like Dead in Bermuda or is a fan of strategy and survival games in general. I have really enjoyed playing this game, and I would definitely recommend you to try out this game and comment on your experience.
