A First Look at Survival Game The Culling

Crouching in brush, my fingers tighten and tense around the handle of my axe. It was a lucky find, pure steel, much superior to its stone brethren that lay scattered beneath the corpses of my first few victims. While most were still cobbling together their blowguns and spears, it hacked away at their limbs and severed their arteries. The weakest of the flock had now all been culled, and only the strong or incredibly lucky remained.

Pulling out my tracker, I mark the direction of my nearest adversary. I’ve no idea what condition he’s in, but I lack a sufficient ranged weapon. Without a way to harry him from afar, my best option is to close the distance quickly with an ambush. My blowgun will disorient him, but it’ll be up to the strength of my axe to fell him. I check my tracker again. He draws close.

I hear him before I see him. His lack of stealth betrays either inexperience, or brash confidence brought on by superior arms. I slink into the shadows, ready to deliver my judgement. He stops for a moment, and I hear a distinct blip in the distance. He pops out of the bushes, compound bow drawn. He, too, has a tracker. My ambush was failed before it began.

In the blink of an eye, hunter becomes the hunted. I sprint from my concealed position to the relative safety of a nearby building. If I can lure him inside, the closed space may be just what I need to even the odds. He isn’t terribly skilled with the bow, and doesn’t manage to hit me as I close the distance to the door. The arrows whistling past my head tell me that his aim is just shy of true. I caught a glimpse of his armor while fleeing. This will be a tough fight.

Crouching behind a staircase, I recover my stamina and save my strength for the fight to come. Certain that he has the upper hand, he barges through the door with sabre drawn. His confidence will be his undoing. My snare trap springs, binding him in place and preventing him from attacking. I flank around behind him, and deal a devastating backstab. It quickly removes half of his health bar. A brief skirmish ensues, but my victory was assured the moment he barged through that door.

As he lies dead on the floor, I take a moment to bandage my wounds and inspect the corpse. I take his compound bow, filling that much needed hole in my arsenal. Despite my preparations, the fight was still hard fought, and the bandage only takes me to 80% health. I head outside, ready to spend my hard earned F.U.N.C. on the healing machine.

As I walk outside, some asshole kills me with a fucking grenade. Fuck.

From one of these perspectives is how the story of every round of The Culling will go. It’s a grueling, brutal, and deeply satisfying crawl to being just short of victory. I don’t begrudge Mr. Handgrenade, since I too was him at some point. He too will likely be slain by someone who magically found a rifle. Rifle Man will likely be ambushed by someone else who found some explosive, and the match will end. It is the circle of life in The Culling, and we all have our place.

For those of you unfamiliar with the scenario I’m describing, The Culling is an upcoming game in the ever more popular “Battle Royale” style. While a lot of players still enjoy the fast paced, instant respawning, Call of Duty (or Quake if you’re old) style frag-fests, the ever widening market of gamers has given rise to a more methodical type of shooter. Some of us prefer our attacks planned and reflexes more steel than twitch, where the perfect kill is a matter of planning and not quickscoping. It’s not Grand Strategy level intricate nerd porn, but hard enough that a lot of more casual players will be turned away.

It’s a trend that has been going on for a while, with roots back in the original Day Z modification. The basic premise has always been pretty much the same, with variable focuses on crafting, building, scavenging, and ganking noobs. I’m vastly oversimplifying it, but all of these games can be assessed on a scale of Day Z and Minecraft. Looking at H1Z1 and Rust side by side, it’s easy to see the inspiration that led them both to very different conclusions. What’s universal is that these games are brutal and punishing.

Games in this vein also try to offer some kind of environmental danger in the form of zombies/mutants/monsters/bears. Regardless of whichever of the dozens of this type of game you pick, any player will tell you that the zombies are basically just background noise and the real meat is the intense player vs player combat. Some titles have attempted to offer more varied enemies or bosslike monsters, but it’s hard to create threatening mindless beasts when some psychopath a mile away has been tracking your position for half an hour just waiting to stab you in the back.

The kind of punishment that these games can dole out has always turned me off of really getting into them. I love building up my inventory and slowly crawling my way up from prey to predator, but it’s soul crushing to lose hours or even days of work to a single misstep. Trying to play on a PVE server also just feels hollow, as the zombies/mutants/demons don’t offer enough of a threat to give a satisfying experience. Luckily, The Culling has heard my calls, and delivered a third option.

Taking place on a tropical island, The Culling drops 16 contestants into the middle of a sprawling enclosed arena with one simple goal: kill or be killed. There isn’t much by way of story yet, but the quirky announcer and visual design that splits between caveman and sci-fi tech gives it it’s own flavor. More adult than The Hunger Games, more brutal than Battle Royale, and more savage than The Most Dangerous Game, The Culling is a game with many inspirations, but little imitation.

I like to imagine that the design doc for The Culling just has “INTENSE SURVIVAL COMBAT” at the top and then just a bunch of other bullshit elements crossed out with big red Xs. Pared down to the most critical elements, The Culling does away with the zombies and crawling around on your stomach for three hours to get a can of peas and a screwdriver. You drop in, gear up, and fight to survive.

Not to say that this game isn’t methodical. Starting a round, players will have 20 minutes to gear up and gank each other before being slowly pushed to the center arena. This fact alone should raise some eyebrows. For a typical survival game, 20 minutes is barely enough time to eat your first rusty can of peaches. For a typical arena shooter, 20 minutes is enough time to rack up 30-40 kills.

It maintains this faster clip through simplified, but not stupefied mechanics. Crafting is easy and intuitive, as players just need to smash whatever is in their hand into whatever they want to craft it with to make a desired item. About 30 seconds into any round, even the newest player should be armed with their first stone dagger. There are only a few rudimentary designs, as the game focuses more on the scavenging element. Various buildings scatter the map, and within are a number of chests, lockers, and cabinets that must be explored to find better weapons and items. As it stands, it’s all pretty basic, but the map is large and diverse enough to make each match unique.

Lucky players will find some tier 2 or 3 weapons in the easy to open lockers and crates, but more valuable locked chests with higher tier loot requires you to spend your hard earned F.U.N.C.. Earned through a mix of survival, exploration, recycling, and murder, F.U.N.C. is your catchall credit for buying everything in the game. It will be used to purchase healing from the healing stations, air drops from the air drop stations, and unlocks from the chest unlocking stations. Each of these open you up to ganking, so it’s all a risk/reward, but in general the player who earned the most F.U.N.C. will be able to get the best gear.

What’s brilliant about this design is that it forces players to move around. I know I’m not alone when I say that campers are the fucking worst. I understand that you feel like the Predator when you post up on a roof for 4 hours, waiting for the perfect moment to shoot me in the head and take my loot. I don’t possess that kind of monk like dedication, and it’s annoying. While it’s possible to camp in The Culling, the single use loot chests and exploration experience makes it a risky proposition. If you don’t manage to snare at least a few flies in your trap, you’ll be undergeared for the final confrontation.

There are some vestigial timed events that I won’t spend too much time going over. At set intervals in a round, a random crate with high tier loot will spawn at an announced location. There isn’t a map currently and I didn’t have enough time with the game to learn the names of all the locations, so I was never able to willingly participate in these events. I get the idea behind it, allowing players to weigh the risk and reward of these early skirmishes, but it’s just not well enough implemented in this alpha state.

Which leads me to the big elephant in the room: this is just alpha. It has all the negative aspects of an alpha product, with some poor tutorials, clunky combat, and imbalanced gear. I have no idea what the various benefits of bleeds, poisons, cripples, and stuns are, other than that one makes my screen all green and I barf randomly. The game has an intuitive enough interface that I can easily figure out which weapon does the most damage, but the numbers displayed didn’t seem to match the damage I was doing.

No matter what kind of build you are going for, there always wound up being a few key optimal items. The blowgun, one of the first weapons you can craft, is absolutely vital even in the late game. It only hits for a handful of damage, but applies a poison that disorients and debilitates for an extended period of time. Guns, though rare, are also incredibly powerful, able to take down enemies in a few shots. The tracker is vital for scavenging unmolested, and heaven help you if you try to beat an armored enemy in melee. A number of other players complained about explosives, but I have to give them a pass. They are so rare and unwieldy that you often wind up killing yourself as much as your opponent.

Without a gun or grenade, combat is a slow game of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Bow. Blocking beats attacking, pushing beats blocking, and attacking beats pushing. Bow beats rock, paper, and scissors, until you are in their face smashing them with your rocks and scissors. You try to whittle them down as much as possible with whatever ranged weapons you have to gain an edge in the frantic melee to come. Weapons can be thrown, but don’t deal enough damage to make it worth the risk. There are also charge attacks, but any kind of damage knocks you out of your swing, making little stabs the preferred method.

Overall, killing an enemy is an arduous process, even with one of those massive damaging backstabs I mentioned earlier. The strongest weapons only hit for small chunks of damage. It can be frustrating to chunk away only to fail when your foe is but a hair from death, but it’s worth it to not be one-shot from nowhere. There’s some interesting stuff you can do with traps, but these are all but useless in the final confrontation. Most games will come down to a brutal final melee.

Despite all the flaws, The Culling in its alpha state is still a more polished and presentable game than many of its more “finished” contemporaries. The struggle to the top of the food chain is satisfying, and the short rounds mean that death isn’t that big of a deal. Sure, when you die, you’re out for good, but you can quickly just jump into a new round and start all over again. It’s the perfect blend of survival and action, allowing you to take some risks without the punishment being a loss of several grueling hours of effort.

In the months to come, I’m looking forward to seeing how The Culling evolves. One of the most crucial fixes is to make sure that teammates spawn close to each other. In the pairs mode, I frequently was crushed by a group that spawned 200 yards away, while my teammate cobbled together some sticks on the other side of the island. A more robust tutorial would be nice, too. I can see there being some kind of leveling system implemented, as there were already a couple of hidden unlocks I stumbled across. Tighten up the combat some and make weapons more unique, and I can see this being my go-to survival game. Just don’t fuck it up with microtransactions.

My time with The Culling was brief, but it left me craving more. Games in alpha are generally little more than stress tests, but The Culling’s faster style and variety gave me a glimpse of something great. For survival game fans, this is definitely one to keep an eye on. I’ll see you guys in the beta, and let you know what I think of stabbing people to death as it evolves.