NOT RECOMMENDED - it is taken as a so-called YouTube game because that way you can avoid the painful trial-and-erroring of unsuspecting blind players and skip the recurring repetitive and grindy parts and the brutal trial-and-erroring newbie-trapping the game is marred with. Calling this game "mid" would be an undeserved praise. Mid games provide better gameplay experiences on average than what this one does.
For context, this is the type of a game where the optimal gameplay style seems to save-scum every day (so that you can try out every possibility and avoid doing suboptimal things) and play it on a slow speed to avoid wasting workable seconds. Needless to say, that kind of gameplay style is extremely draining and usually a sign of the developers not understanding what the 'fair' part in 'fair difficulty' entails. The most likely explanation is that the developers were too lazy to design and adapt the difficulty and instead decided to add zero safeguards for resource acquisitions in a game that is all about that very thing.
I recommend that you take the less painful approach by hacking your resource values with Cheat Engine and using save scumming to scout things out, though that does little to alleviate the INTENTIONAL lack of time (read: do not expect to have any fun with this product).
You have zero creative gameplay freedom in this game. If you deviate from the intended optimal action path even slightly, you will quickly face resource starvation and your game is effectively over. Case to point, to make the staple meat source that is Rat Trap, you need to first upgrade your Storage house. See the point about having to stick to the developer's gameplay script or lose. This "gameplay script" includes going against tutorial windows' tips and advice. Welcome to the Russian Game Syndrome where grinding in a specific way is mandatory.
In my first playthrough, the game spawned mostly wood resources besides the plot-fixed ones. My pigs died after the first week even though I feed everything I had to them. There are no instructions what to feed. The game mechanic explanations provided in it are on par with Dark Souls' ones - COMPLETELY USELESS. You are wasting my time by not giving a straight answer even in the "tutorial" windows.
The production values in game design are quite low and not varied at all. It is pretty much two lame game modes stapled together and fitted with a super punitive time limit mechanic that never relents. Most of these issues are bypassed by watching someone's gameplay instead it and being able to skip the filler parts. The game actual gameplay experience makes it worse than it looks due to things such as sluggish controls and the lack of concise view of your resource numbers at any time... in a resource management game.
it is a game with a myriad of technical and game design issues with a high review score even though no one can properly praise anything in it other than "it plays like This War of Mine." Context check: This War of Mine is so badly designed you need extensive guides to have any idea about how to play the game. Even in Siege Survival, none of the numerous tutorial windows manage to convey the very basic information about what the optimal gameplay loop is like just to stay afloat in the game.
In short, unless you already know or have amazing guessing skills, a blind playthrough of the game is a waste of time because it is clearly optimized for the player who has played the game before (and somehow is not already bored of the ultra repetitive gameplay).
A resource bean-counter simulator and a stressful, nonstop rush against the timer while your resources dwindle at a rapid rate and the game gives you no indications of how to do anything. The optimization in the game is lacking and the framerate dips a lot even when there is no action on-screen (read: cannot manage static assets well). This leads to issue of delayed controls, on top of the godawful UI (hidden vital numbers, the mouse-only-activated interaction boxes that only work if you click them pixel perfectly on the exact center of it). Then there is inputs randomly dropping. Also the characters and objects are really small even in the lowest resolution, so it is as difficult to play with mouse-only controls as possible.
The most irritating feature is that your characters have to be 100 % manually controlled, meaning they will do NOTHING USEFUL outside the tasks you explicitly order them to do. Not only are you bean-countering every resource unit, because you are also having to do the same to your characters individually. That is a lot of extra work because there are five (5) of them while the average, individual task duration is short. That is yet another aspect of this game's stressful forced rush nature.
Considering that every second matters in this game (read: pointless punitive nonsense), that means you have to constantly stop the game and micro-manage a perfectly-timed new order for them to fulfil to not get screwed by the game mechanics. There is ZERO aids (heh) to help you keep these dudes working and producing results. That means you are constantly having to focus intensely to make sure your game is not getting screwed.
I read some guide and the game looks even worse: the never-ending resource scarcity, the benefits of killing the guards (read: what the game told you explicitly to avoid), save-scumming as the only way to counter the bombardment killing farm animals, running discouraged even though that is exactly what you should do, etc. One guy noted that the game objectives often try to make you craft items before upgrading the crafting buildings that is a big no-no in a game with extremely limited resources and will significantly worsen your gameplay success prospects. Objectives that mess up the game - what a novel concept I have never seen before. It must feel inspring to be able to trailblaze new lows in the history of game design.
These features are typical of unpolished or unfinished games and most of them disappeared in the industry after the 1990s. There isn't any visible pay-off in the game mechanics to keep the average player from getting bored of and fed up with the repeated same-old while the performance demands grow, will lead to the average player quitting the game.
Again, do not believe the review scores. It might have an okay intro cutscene, though the gameplay itself is comparable to a cheap Flash game with the only goal type being "make the number go up." When they say in the description that you "scavenge" and "craft supplies", they are being painfully honest - there is nothing else to this game.
I do not appreciate the developer response to another review where a time-slowing, third-party mod was recommended. Sure, the forced rush gameplay IS one of experience and choice destroying aspects that MAKES THE GAME LESS FUN. The point of being a game developer is giving the players the choice and the control OUT-OF-THE-BOX instead of relying on the free labor to do it for you. It also communicated that the game design issues are 100 % intentional and that more of them are introduced as the game progresses.
The reason why the "hardcore gamer" game design is bad idea is that most people are not jobless, lifeless rejects that want to play the same video game extensively or have redemption complex issues that make self-imposed torture feel okay. There is also the issue of the artificial difficulty being cheap padding and a replacement for actual content. Once you introduce the concept of quality of those game hours, that difficulty-padding starts to make the cheap parts of the game even cheaper. The ones most undeserving of redemption seem to be the developers. How about next time showing some sympathy towards the people who paid real money for your product only to get a disappointing experience in return. A spoiler: they are not going to return.
I got this game from a Fanatical Mystery Game bundle.
