If you skip combat, you won’t get the gear you need to take down enemies further down the line, but if you don’t see a way to beat a group, you can often get around them and come back, preferably when you have better gear and abilities.

In most areas, your goal is to simply reach the entrance to the next location. Though combat is Mutant Year Zero’s main draw, you are rarely forced into big battles. It’s hard to overstate how much stealth factors into every encounter. Over time, you develop a feel for it, but you’re also going to do a lot of saving and reloading when you wind up accidentally picking a fight you can’t win. There are awareness indicators when you’re in stealth mode, so it’s not hard to avoid detection before combat starts, but you do not get indicators as to how far the sound of your gunshots travels. That range is not always entirely clear, so there is a bit of guesswork involved. The moment you fire a gun, enemies within a certain range will hear you. I would have loved to know more about the mutants and seen more characters like them, but what’s there was enough to keep me in sync with the story the whole way through. Your interesting characters like Dux, the smart-aleck half-man, half-Mallard and Farrow, a tough half-woman half-fox with a British accent drew me in even with limited speaking time and only a broad backstory to flesh them out. There is a kernel of interesting storytelling and design in your squad, the Mutants. I haven’t spent any time with the original pen-and-paper game, so I can’t speak to whether or not it’s successful as an act of fan service, but Road to Eden’s repetitive overgrown scrapyards, cannibal marauders and rogue robots feel like a fairly bland version of the Mutant mythos relative to what fans have been imagining for years. It’s a grab bag of society crumbling clichés. That story, sadly, never feels vital, even when it becomes tied to your squad’s own mission.

“Don’t get me wrong: There’s a ton of world-building - exposition extolled through in-game dialogue and non-animated cutscenes, text, and audio diaries strewn about the world - but it mostly helps advance Mutant Year Zero’s Horizon: Zero Dawn-style unraveling of how humanity destroyed itself.

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