Help Will Come Tomorrow on test: Stranded in the wilderness

After the hit “We. The Revolution.” the spiritual successor to the Indi game, “Help Will Come Tomorrow” has now been released. The strategy survival game from the Polish developer Arclight Creations is set in 1917, during the Russian Revolution. You take control of a group of survivors of a train accident, who are stranded in the Siberian wilderness. How Help Will Come Tomorrow does in the test and who should take a closer look at the game, you will learn in this report.

The freezing wilderness

After a short cutscene you will find yourself in your camp with four survivors. At the beginning this is not a real camp at all, because first the appropriate structures have to be built.

But as you will spend most of the game time in the camp, it’s of course worthwhile to expand it accordingly. This requires two things: materials and energy. Both are limited.

Each of your characters can have up to three action points. Most activities consume at least one, some even more. However, the number of points at the beginning of the day can be reduced by negative status changes such as fatigue or illness. In any case, you will need to reassess on a daily basis whether you want to use the energy to collect materials and food, expand your camp, or create items such as tools or food. Life and death (and individual body parts) are at stake in each of these decisions. Because one thing becomes clear pretty damn quickly: The ice tundra does not forgive mistakes.

Classical crafting system

As in almost every survival game, Help Will Come Tomorrow also has a crafting system. The crafting materials belong to different categories, such as meat or wood. In each category they have different numbers of points. If you want to build or cook something, you will be shown how many points of each category you need. For example, if you need three points for wood, it doesn’t matter if you use three sticks or a log, as long as you have the right amount of points. Of course you can be very wasteful, which is not necessarily a good idea.

At this point a curiosity of the game becomes apparent. You can only put materials into each craftigslot that are already stacked in your inventory – so you can’t use a tree trunk and a branch. This can get annoying quickly, of course. Also, food does not stack, for example, if it is spoiled to different degrees. That can be incredibly frustrating when cooking and doesn’t make too much sense in my eyes.

Nine characters, nine stories

In Help Will Come Tomorrow there are nine different characters you can control. You start with four random characters. They all have their own backgrounds and personalities. This naturally influences the relationships they have with each other.

One factor, which influences the relationships in the beginning, are the different factions. Each character is either a revolutionary, an aristocrat or neutral – and these three factions can’t stand each other.

But what does this mean for the gameplay? It’s very simple: If two characters don’t like each other, but still work together, their morale drops. Morale is an important factor next to the health of the characters – if it is low, it leads to negative status, which can affect the success of the activities. In the worst case it can also happen that a character loses his nerves overnight and throws all the wood into the fire because he cannot live with the cold anymore.

But the different character traits also influence the game in other ways: A clumsy character sometimes fails to carry out an action, a suspicious one trusts his comrades fundamentally less, while an open-hearted one has better relations with his camp mates from the start. Thus each game starts under different conditions than the previous one.

Exploring the wilderness

Although you will find some materials and food in the camp right at the beginning of the game, they might get you through the first two days. It is therefore imperative that you explore the Wilderness and search for useful items. You can send up to two characters out to explore the Wilderness. You can now move your expedition across the map, field by field, uncovering them one by one.

In the meantime, you can find all sorts of things – but be careful, because the same criminals responsible for derailing your train are still making the area unsafe. It’s also possible that your expedition will get lost and have to spend the night in the forest.

However, you may not only encounter bandits, but also animals that you can hunt for materials. With a little luck you will find more survivors, which you can take in your camp.

Important decisions

At the end of each day, all the camp residents present gather around the fire and talk, either about current events, their past or God and the world. You can find out a lot of details about the individual characters and influence the course of the conversation by making decisions. During these conversations the relationship between the characters can improve or deteriorate, as well as the morale, both of the individual inhabitants and of the whole camp.

The group can also decide which steps they want to take next, for example, that they want to investigate a certain place in the environment. These objectives are recorded in a quest log, some are temporary and some are not.

But these are not the only moments when you have to make decisions: Both in camp and during explorations, events can be triggered. These are described by means of a text, and then decisions may have to be made – which, like so many things in Help Will Come Tomorrow, could result in death.

However, at this point it is unfortunately also very noticeable that there is no German translation. The characters don’t speak simple English by far and often talk about historical events.

conclusion

Help Will Come Tomorrow is a tough game. Even at the lowest difficulty level, any mistake can cost a character his life. That’s a good thing too. After all, it shouldn’t be easy to survive unprepared between ice and snow while being pursued by criminals. The pace of the game depends on the player. There is no timer running out, time only passes when you click on the next field during exploration or when the day is finished. There are no situations in the game that require quick action. Thus the game has no action elements and is certainly not for everyone. But if you are looking for a challenging survival strategy game, you will definitely find it here.

A game run lasts about 4-5 hours, but the game offers huge replay potential, each of the characters has a lot to offer and it is worthwhile to let them tell their own stories. With a price of about 20 € I can recommend a purchase with a clear conscience.