Help Will Come Tomorrow: Review

I decided that I would follow Help Will Come Tomorrow, immediately after reading the first sentence of its description on Steam: it mentioned that the game takes place in a Siberian forest on the eve of the October Revolution. A little further in this description, a strange Immerse yourself in touching story set in 1917 pre-Bolschevik Imperial Russia was discovered (what the hell is Imperial, if the game takes place in the fall, and the emperor abdicated the throne in March?!), but I kindly closed my eyes to this inconsistency.

Russia in 1917 is an extremely interesting and rich historical setting: there is anarchy in the country, there is confusion at the front, the struggle of political ideas is more acute than ever… But games, especially domestic ones, for some reason bypass this era – Help Will Come Tomorrow, the first serious game about the Russian revolution (not counting "Petka and Vasily Ivanovich") made in Poland. However, there is little revolution here: the heroes traveled peacefully east along the Trans-Siberian Railway until mysterious bandits derailed the train to kill passengers and profit from their valuables. Wild time – everyone survives as best they can.

Taiga Robinsons

The shortest possible description Help Will Come Tomorrow – this is a “budget This War of Mine». Comrades in misfortune who barely know each other, finding themselves in a hostile environment with a tiny supply of means of subsistence, save themselves as best they can: they cook their own food and make useful objects from whatever God will send them and stoke the fire all day long so as not to freeze. The only thing the poor souls can hope for is that the train crash will attract someone’s attention and that someone will send for help. But no help comes, and the terrorists are still hanging around somewhere nearby.

To survive, the heroes, despite class hatred and polar political views, have to learn to act together. The game forms your team of survivors randomly: it may include an extreme left-wing Marxist radical, an old countess who is a fan of the old order, a Siberian peasant, or an English lord traveler. In calm years, these people actually lived in different universes, but now they have to look for a common language – in a different situation, such an introduction could pass for the beginning of a sitcom.

Edward: “If you saw a steam locomotive flying into the abyss in Upper Burma, you would understand what I’m talking about!" Anna: "Have you seen an ordinary fist in the face from close range??"(Off-screen laughter.)

The resources necessary for survival have to be obtained around the area, equipping expeditions for them. In the thicket you can find branches, stones, grass and moss – with all this we set up a camp and light a fire, and you can gnaw the bark of trees if there is no other food left. You can go south, rummage through the wreckage of the train – there is richer loot there: rags from which bandages and clothes are made, scrap metal, coal and vodka. If you’re very lucky, you’ll even find someone’s firearm among the frozen corpses – all you have to do is repair it, get some ammo, and you don’t have to worry about food for the rest of the game.

All game events, including hunting, are text quests. We come to an area where there is something edible, and choose what we will do, and the result is at the mercy of a random number generator. If we are lucky, we are provided with meat for several days. If you’re unlucky… I’ll come back to this a little later.

Work again?

The map on which the heroes move during expeditions consists of hexagonal cells. We leave the central tile, move to the neighboring one, click on the “Search” button, take the resources we find with us, go to the next cell – and so on until we decide that it’s time to return to the camp.

You won’t be able to www.pink-casino-online.co.uk wander through the forest forever: every move or search can take away action points from the character. When they are finished, the expedition will almost certainly get lost, remain in the forest overnight and return to camp with collected supplies only the next morning. If he comes back.

The black figures are bandits whose location changes every night. Going into their cages is certain death, into the neighboring cages is a big risk, the rest are relatively safe.

Action points are the most important resource in the game. Characters spend them while walking through the forest, setting up a camp, preparing food, healing, crafting items – almost for every sneeze. Our main concern is not even the search for firewood or food: we melted the snow, collected mushrooms and roots from the forest, cooked them over the fire – here you have soup for everyone. The main problem is that the heroes have the strength to do this.

AP is never enough, and ineffective use is punishable. If you leave a character hungry (tired, wounded, sad, sick…), then the next morning he will have even less action points than usual – and at the same time he will still want to eat, drink, sleep and be warm. All you have to do is stop babysitting the characters for a little while – and now your brave team, putting aside class differences, gathers in full force around the fire and flatly refuses to do anything. Start over.

The first two squads of my survivalists perished ingloriously in the taiga, but by the third attempt, when I learned to prioritize (upgrade the water filter as soon as possible!), the process became extremely exciting. Not only are there always many more urgent matters than characters have AP, but they are also constantly plagued by failures. For example, a white-handed aristocrat cut his hand while cutting up the carcass of a caught hare. I need to bandage the wound, but crafting bandages requires rags, which I don’t have.

Cursing everything in the world, I wonder whether it is worth sending my freshest people on an expedition for fabric; will return (if they return: they may come across bandits on the way) they will already be tired, without OA and, quite possibly, empty-handed. In addition, then I won’t be able to improve the bed, that is, the characters won’t get enough sleep and won’t want to work the next day. Cursing, I make a decision: to leave the unfortunate butcher to bleed and hope that in the morning he will somehow recover. Such compromises have to be made almost every game day – the gameplay does not allow you to take a breath and makes you fidget on the edge of your chair all the time.

If you order a character to work with someone they can’t stand, their morale will drop (which – quite rightly – may result in less AP the next day). Pairs of builders have to be carefully selected – at such moments Help Will Come Tomorrow begins to resemble Dom-2.

However, decisions often have to be made based on incomplete information. The game doesn’t really like to reveal its internal mathematics (although the situation is improving with patches), so sometimes you need to guess: for example, if the character is “very” tired, is it necessary to invest in improving the bed right now or will the existing one be suitable, and it would be better to direct resources to upgrading the workshop? There is no opportunity to conduct experiments: even at an average difficulty level, the game almost does not tolerate non-optimal consumption of AP.

One way or another, I lived in the forest for two whole weeks – after which the game said that the bandits had found our camp and killed all the survivors. End. I was in despair: would I really have to start over?? I didn’t have to: when the credits ended, I saw the “Continue” button in the main menu, clicked on it, and the fateful day began anew – my living (and even almost healthy) poor fellows were sitting by the fire as if nothing had happened. I lived through the day for the second time, lost again – and the game kindly allowed me to try again.

Apart from character perks, the only way to restore AP during the day is to use a Leuzea with vodka. Well, you know, these Russians!

Savescamming, or Life in the Forest

When the game showed me how to “abuse” her, there was no trace of tension left. Whereas before I was risk-averse and playing it safe, now every morning I sent characters out on the most dangerous expedition first and replayed the day until I succeeded, knowing that if I failed, I would be safe. Went hunting – missed the animal – started the day again. I went again – got caught by bandits – again. I went for the third time – I got it – I brought a mountain of game to the camp. Several successful forays – and there was simply no need to leave the camp. The collected heap of resources was enough to fatten until the end of the game, regardless of expenses.

Could I resist savescamming?? Probably yes. Perhaps I just wanted to get back at the game for its high difficulty. I understand that it’s my own fault, since I decided to take the easy path, but all my interest in the process of survival evaporated immediately after that. From that moment on, I yawned lazily and tried to finish the daily routine as soon as possible in order to move on to the nightly conversation around the fire. They were still curious.

The gameplay of Help Will Come Tomorrow is completely turn-based: even in the most tense moments, it doesn’t rush you anywhere. The entire game is also played with the left mouse button, so it will be a welcome guest on mobile platforms.

A nobleman is not a comrade for a Bolshevik

When the sun sets, the survivors sit around the fire and begin to chat about daily matters. At first, the characters talk about themselves, propose plans of action and discuss what is happening. After a week or two, when everyone knows each other, the forest has been explored, and there is less and less hope for salvation, politics becomes the main topic of evening conversations.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t really encourage this kind of debate. The characters do not and cannot have any agreement on ideological issues, therefore, when one of the heroes starts a conversation about how, they say, it was good to live under some and it would be bad under others, someone will probably not like it, their relationship will deteriorate, and the morale of the squad will suffer – because of this, as already mentioned, the game begins to take away AP from the survivors. Give each other compliments, talk about everyday life, share stories from life, the game advises, – then the characters will begin to sympathize with each other. I would be glad, but there are two problems: firstly, conversations about politics are the most interesting (revolutionary Russia, a unique historical setting!), secondly, you choose topics for dialogue virtually blindly.

The game allows you to choose from as many as five topics, but from such brief descriptions it’s very rare to predict what exactly the conversation will be about. Just like in life: you never know how nightly gatherings around the fire will end.

It’s amazing how correctly, despite political antipathy, the characters behave: their debates almost never descend into swearing. My survivors lost their temper only once, when the Bolshevik agitator finally fed up everyone else with his Marxist sermons. The rest of the time, the characters’ conversations resemble either intellectual kitchen conversations or university lectures – even uneducated local proletarians have brilliant political literacy and an enviable vocabulary. The speech of a peasant is indistinguishable from the speech of a lord – in my opinion, this is confusing and makes it very difficult to believe in what is happening.

It’s interesting that the characters never tire of defending their views even on the verge of death. One evening, two survivors got into a heated discussion about Russia’s chances of winning the world war. The next morning, one of them died from bleeding, fatigue and frostbite, and the second decided to remember his comrade, got drunk on vodka, left the camp drunk, froze and also died.