Hydroneer - Thoughts

Every so often I run up against a game I can't wrap my brain around. Not in the sense that I fail to understand its mechanics or can't complete it, but that I don't really grasp its widespread appeal. Or maybe I get its theoretical appeal, but find it so severely wanting that I convince myself there must be more to the experience. There are a couple of older titles that I struggle with (Kingdom Hearts, Halo, Red Dead Redemption), but I haven't felt this way about a modern game (sans Mass Attack) for a good while now.

 

That is, until I played Hydroneer—an automation sandbox game that's as fulfilling as eating several sleeves of saltines in a row.

 

Despite the aquatic moniker, Hydroneer is as dry as a game could be. You're plopped down onto an island with a lantern, shovel, and a big patch of land to excavate... and that's all the guidance you get. If you nose around a bit you'll find several stores, a merchant to sell to, and a few quests that seem to point you in the right direction, but they're all red herrings. What you have to do is start sifting through the dirt, because you're going to need a good chunk of money in order to start automating.

 

Interacting with the game at any level will immediately reveal its make-or-break gimmick: no inventory. You're only allowed to pick up and hold one thing at a time, which will either sound like an absolute nightmare or an inviting challenge. I chose to take it as the latter and gradually began filling a bucket with enough ore to buy the rest of the refinement line. This however, was a misstep—smelting ingots and forging jewelry demanded too much manual labor for the scant increase in earnings they provided (25%?!). I had forgotten the #1 rule for any factory game: if you can make it, automate it.

 

So off I went, money in hand (since you don't have pockets) to go purchase some machines. I set up a driller, connected it to a water pipeline for power, and watched as it spat endless chunks of dirt onto the ground. After smacking my forehead in shame I went back to the store to grab a harvester so I could transform those useless brown chunks into ore. A couple of awkwardly dug holes later and I was able to place a bucket below the harvester, and then...

 

... I was done.

 

I don't mean that I was done with the game, but the automation portion was effectively solved. You see, Hydroneer doesn't let you purchase more drillers or harvesters unless you go make your own at a mountain forge all the way across the map, starting at a ludicrous price of 300 units of metal ore—roughly $3700 worth of product. Mind you, the most expensive patch of land in the game is only $7200, and very few items (vehicles) breach the 1k mark. So rather than spending hours selling goods to double my output, I dug down as low as I could go in order to get better quality ore out of my lone driller. Then after doing some exploring and ruminating, I sold all my ore, bought all the plots of land on the island, and then finally called it quits for good.

 

See, a weird thing about Hydroneer that I didn't know going in is that it's a "sandbox" game in the literal sense. You decide how much to industrialize this humble patch o' dirt; there are no objectives, no enemies, no meters to manage, or deadlines to hit. I guess you could try and complete the quests leading up to the king, but considering the second quest requires five thousand units of metal ore, it feels less like a guideline and more like an absurd postgame target. There is more to do in Hydroneer than mining—there's farming, fishing, house building, and even logic circuits of all things—but the only thought I had regarding those was "... why?"

 

I don't mean to be smarmy; I was there for Minecraft's 2011 Alpha, I know how cool it is to just goof around making things in a digital world. But what separates Hydroneer from its kin is its dreaded "no inventory" limitation. That binding makes any creative endeavor an absolute headache to navigate around, like playing an MMORPG at walking speed or a MOBA on a trackpad. I don't want to build a house or cultivate crops in a game where the purported goal is to use automation to bypass your handicap. And when the automation conundrum can be effectively solved in the first few hours (thanks to every mineral type being available in the starting plot), what is there left to do but twiddle your thumbs and make up insufferable goals on your lonesome?

 

Perhaps I'm just the wrong audience for Hydroneer. But then it begs the question: who is the game for? People that only buy one game off Steam a year? Folks unbothered by the sunk-cost fallacy? Satisfactory and Valheim are brilliant alternatives that offer the same kind of "rags to riches" gameplay with stringent (but smart!) limitations. Hell, Minecraft still stands tall in its field, packed with unrivaled potential for stunning architecture and complex logic doohickeys! I feel a tad annoyed to have bought into Hydroneer's hype, its agonizingly-slow pace projected as "part of the charm" rather than the obnoxious time-sink it is. Hydroneer is a game that doesn't fill a niche beyond "something to play while bored", to which the cures are already vast and innumerable.