If you ever wanted to play as a doctor in the middle ages while the plague is raving the lands, the early access game: The Black Death might take your attention. It got ours, so we decided to see what the game has to offers.
All alone…or so you think
The journey starts at Freemans Port, a small village which has some troubles with the plague. To get familiar with the game a small tutorial will appear and lead you through some of the key features. As a doctor one of your responsibilities is to see how the plague evolves by doing risky autopsies on dead bodies. But the plague isn’t the only thing you have to worry about as bandits, animals and other players roam the map. As dying is unavoidable, you will lose your inventory and unspend skill points when it happens.
As it’s a survival game, you will need to take care of your health, hunger and thirst by either gathering food and water yourself or simply steal or buy it from merchants. Yet, not everything you are able to buy or gather is of good quality, which could result in becoming ill when consuming. The crafting system allows you to craft different weapons, armour and tools to survive the harshness of the world. All these actions will grand you experience which will level your character up with a skill point as reward. As there are different professions in the game you will have to think carefully where you want to spend them on.
The moment you collected enough coins you are able to buy a land contract from a Town Earl which allows you to build your own house. But be careful, as there are up to 50 players on a server who are able to disown you or destroy your house. To prevent this you can upgrade your house and hire guards to patrol around it. If you own a house and a bed you will respawn here the moment you die.
Let the Updates begin
While it’s normal for early access titles to have some troubles, The Black Death has been struggling with a decrease in players. Yet, this didn’t stop the developers, a small team called Small Impact Games, from putting down developer blogs as well as new updates. Since the beginning of December a number of updates happened to the game, including additional customisation for female characters, craftable backpacks as well as a new kingdom named Frostfall located in Mercia’s snowy eastern plains.
While the game has an unique setting, it will still need a lot of polishing before it’s able to turn into a great survival game. But thats also the reason it’s still in early access. A great addition to the game would be a better combat system. For now the developers are still working on bug fixes and adding new ideas to the game, so it might just be a matter of time. If you like the idea of the game just as much as us, you might want to keep an eye out for their updates, we will at least.
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