Scavengers of the Mutant World: Flying Fish and Laser Vision

Nice outfit, gimp.

Scavengers of the Mutant World is not a good game--I know this without question--but somehow it's got me in its vise. God help me, I want to win this one. It feels like it shouldn't take that long, either. It's just hard. I've restarted three new games since I last posted (and no more naming my own characters or swapping portraits--it takes too long).

My understanding of the "quest" is that I need to bring various items and parts back to Lau and to assemble the parts, using sets of blueprints, into working machines. I don't know how many items, parts, and machines I need to collect, but I've barely gotten started.

Note the wheels and the drive axle in the storeroom.

In two of the scenarios, I found some blueprints early on that listed the parts needed for a car:

An anchor?

The parts are scattered about the different ruins, and I don't know if they're randomized or fixed in the game world. I also don't know if there's just one of each or more, but I've only found one of each so far. In my last scenario, I had the shaft, oil, axle, and exhaust system, but my main party died in a radiation storm--a bolt of lightning killed them instantly--and my relief party was slaughtered by junkyard dogs while trying to retrieve their stuff. I could have continued, but I had lost 8 out of 20 scavengers, and since I was still mostly just exploring the game, I decided to start anew.

Frermynd gets her hands on a shaft.

In addition to weapons, armor, parts, and food, you find several usable items scattered about the world. One, a "teaching machine," increased attributes for my characters the two times that it worked. Another, a "decontamination unit," was helpful for restoring my radiation points.

I'm not sure how a "teaching machine" increases strength. Perhaps it's a shake-weight.

The manual had warned about radiation storms. Generally, they're dangerous and cause loss of attribute points, or death. But in one memorable storm, one of my characters mutated to shoot laser beams out of her eyes. It was useful in the next few combats. If The Day After had featured such plot points, I'm not sure I would have feared a nuclear holocaust so much.

Knowing the exact distance and direction to the nearest ruin is important for when radiation storms come along.

The monsters turned out to be the type you would expect in a post-apocalyptic nightmare: mutants, scavengers from rival tribes, giant spiders, insect abominations. They seem to start off easy and get a lot tougher as the game progresses. I'm not sure if this is because I'm getting farther from Lau, or because the game senses you're approaching the completion of a goal and ramps up the difficulty.


I took video of a brief bit of gameplay below. Despite its brevity, you see a lot of gameplay here: wandering around Lau, engaging some mutant fish, finding some food, weathering a radiation storm and getting laser vision, using a decontamination unit, and starting to explore a new ruin called Ceniste.

The game, I should also mention, automatically saves every couple of turns. There's no quitting and reloading if something unpleasant happens.

I'm determined to keep at it until I can at least put together a car. I've also noted, in my quest for original reviews and ads for the game (mentioned yesterday), that there are few sites that have any detail about Scavengers. No matter how much I write, other sites will probably always have more information about Ultima IV and Pool of Radiance, but I can still be the authoritative source on obscure games like Scavengers.