Away: The Survival Series (PS5)
Away: The Survival Series bills itself as a playable nature documentary, and when it comes to the trappings of one, it certainly has that down pat. The requisite British narrator talking about the moments both simple and extraordinary in an animal’s life and the fairly realistic look to the world (unless you look at it too closely) help you get into the right mindset, and the focus on a sugar glider even gives you some believable range in your actions since you’ll be able to clamber up trees and glide through the air. The stage is set, it looks the part… but Away: The Survival Series’s hopes unfortunately collide harshly with the interactive side of this survival adventure.
Away: The Survival Series takes place on Saviour Island in a bit of a surprising sci-fi premise for a game that mostly otherwise leans on natural elements. A calamity called “The Shift” has left much of the world uninhabitable, this little island becoming a hodgepodge of ecosystems after what creatures could survive the harsh new conditions found their way to it. The concept might partly be justification for mixing together creatures from different parts of the planet, but you’ll also find the ruins of advanced human facilities from just before humanity found they weren’t one of the animals able to survive The Shift. In fact, you can even find holographic messages left by people investigating that disaster or its after-effects, although while the narrator does comment on it, it is a fun touch that the sugar glider you play as activates them by accident and shows no interest in them, such matters far above his understanding.
The background thread of humanity’s fate requires you to explore side areas a bit too often to get meager morsels and feels a bit at odds with the documentary idea, but so too, in a way, does the actual plot of this adventure. You play as a sugar glider joey, and after your father’s death, you’re thrust a bit into a provider role despite your youth for your mother and little sister. That new status quo doesn’t last long though, a vulture snagging your parent and sibling and flying off across the island. Rather than eating its prey or killing them so they’re easier to carry, the vulture takes its sweet time letting them writhe in its talons, a bit of a break from what you’d expect from a hunter but it allows for the more human narrative of a familiar rescue mission to take place. The story is all about guiding your joey to rescue his family, the path there containing a few different dangers beyond just survival to spice it up and make it more like a Disney movie than a nature documentary in a way.
The sugar glider you play as does need to eat to survive, although this is a mechanic without much weight to it. Mushrooms and raspberries can be found in most every location you move through in abundance, the only time you might have an empty belly being during more action-packed sections like outrunning flood water or trying to slowly sneak past a tarantula that is almost as big as a dog. Food can heal you up as well and munching on things along the way is at least slightly immersive, although some video game elements also reward chowing down on more unique meals or eating often. Upgrades to your stamina and flight power as well as bonuses like extra time in a survival view that helps you identify nearby objects may make you stop to try and hunt a lizard or bug when you see one, although hunting and combat in general are unfortunately just the first of many sloppy areas of this game’s mechanical design. Your sugar glider can slash at enemies with Circle or pounce at them if you hold it down, although the pounce is constantly prone to errors. Flinging you off into incorrect directions, launching you through your target’s body, or hitting but still not doing damage are common enough occurrences you might avoid using the lunge, but your claw swipes move your glider a fair bit forward without the best indication on whether you even hurt your target. Swiping wildly to clear out spiders feels like something you do without thought, but when you do face an actual structured battle like some confrontations with snakes, you have to utilize dodging too that throws your joey hard to the left or right. Following up with an attack can be sloppy here as well, and it’s for the best Away: The Survival Series only rarely leans on fighting and even more fortunate that a death won’t set you back very far with only the tiny penalty of your belly being half full afterwards.
Perhaps exploring Saviour Island is meant to be the more appealing side of things, but it’s not free of its own issues. During the story, the path forward will almost always be marked with glowing blue mushrooms, this keeping you from deviating too much but also being far too direct in that you can practically go on auto-pilot when it comes to following this clear uncomplicated path. Some stretches require no thought as a result, but then there are other sequences like leaping between the backs of deer in a scene more fitting an action movie than something that does at least mostly try to hew towards realism. Sequences where you need to press the right button to jump or act when you otherwise have no control slow things down so it’s hard to mess them up, these events often focused more on flashy scenes like just avoiding being alligator food rather than letting you experience the moment or find your own way to survive. When you are climbing about or exploring though, you also run into little issues with how the sugar glider latches onto things. Trying to reach the end of a branch can lead to you struggling with the thin surface as your glider would rather hang upside down from it than listen to your inputs, and jumps can sometimes ignore your positioning and just fling you high into the air. Gliding is at least straightforward and the story is smart about setting things up for easy leaps to new landing spots, but climbing and crawling can have issues with the shape of surfaces that sometimes slow down otherwise decent navigation.
Stealth sections also rear their head from time to time in very plain ways. You’ll see cover like different patches of tall grass you need to run between, some predator nearby perking up when it notices your movement so you sit still until it calms back down and then repeat that process over and over until you finally reach the end of the straightforward but slow sequence. Avoiding predators is a reasonable idea to include, but Away: The Survival Series decides the way to make them dangerous is giving them the power to teleport if you are out in the open for too long, an instant death able to snag you even if you could see your killer had no way to reach you. Most of Away: The Survival Series is essentially a platformer at least, jumping around and making your way forward more common than moments where these uninteresting disruptions arise, but there is a pure exploration mode as well where you get the freedom to deviate from glowing mushroom paths and explore the island at your leisure. Curiously, a game-changing mechanic is saved only for those willing to scour the island a fair bit, the player able to take control of a good deal of other animals like a mantis, scorpion, and frog. What could have been a nice way to break up the short but sloppy story is saved only for those willing to put up with more rough navigation to get to this extra feature, although since you aren’t even given the best ways to quickly traverse the island or track optional activities, it’s hardly inviting to start before you also remember all the control woes that you experienced on the path to this mode.
THE VERDICT: When you’re just gliding around a pretty nice looking natural environment, listening to the narrator add some extra weight to simple actions, Away: The Survival Series is nearly okay. Then it’s time to do anything of note, you’ll encounter a routine list of issues. Combat is imprecise by nature thanks to your strange attacks and movement, navigation is either ruined by the mushroom trail making it too simple or poor surface cohesion causing frequent unwanted behaviors, and then the game will place you in dull sneaking sections or sequences where you just occasionally press a button while watching an animal action movie unfold. Away: The Survival Series says it wants to be a nature documentary you can play only for so many aspects of it to unfortunately remind you that you’re playing a video game and not a well put together one at that.
And so, I give Away: The Survival Series for PlayStation 5…
A TERRIBLE rating. I considered rating it a little more favorably before realizing the moments that I thought best of were ones defined more by nothing going particularly wrong rather than anything actually interesting taking place. Conflict is always problematic in Away: The Survival Series, controls sloppy and animations not doing the best to show you what’s happening even when they’re not glitching out. Survival is a stapled on element and even that has bugs occur like a point where eating plants I found didn’t cause them to disappear like normal. Really though, the constant bugbear haunting this simple sugar glider’s journey is the issues in the fundamentals of navigation. Climbing a tree can already have the camera whip around in unhelpful ways as you try to go out on a limb only to see your glider disobey since the appearance of a branch isn’t always the same as how its surface can actually be walked on. Those blue mushrooms that take away a good deal of the thought needed to progress are actually a godsend since they simplify things enough that you don’t have to contend with areas where the movement is less refined. The narrative about the humans is unfortunately a weak bonus much like the exploration mode’s aimlessness despite its baffling hidden feature of controlling other animals, and it’s hard to say if there’s even much value for a nature lover here since Saviour Island’s hodgepodge population isn’t detailed that often and creatures like black widows and black mambas are made less lethal so you can beat them after taking multiple bites.
If Away: The Survival Series had gone for pure realism, something more educational, or just got down its movement well enough for it to be unobtrusive, there would be some merit in just getting to experience a sugar glider’s life in an interactive form. This is no simulator though, it barely even qualifies as a survival game, and it gets in its own way with its efforts to be more of a video game or something with its own lore rather than a more naturalistic experience that could have gotten a pass from players interested in embodying a sugar glider. Instead, while it’s not egregiously terrible, most everything in the experience has some issue of varying degrees, even a nature loving gamer best off staying away from Away: The Survival Series.