There is a lot of post-apocalyptic hype going on at the moment. People are excited about Fallout 4 or are still impressed about how good the new Mad Max movie from earlier this year really is! I share their excitement and want to check out all other things post-apocalyptic. Sheltered is one of those things, and it’s pretty cool!
Sheltered is a post-apocalyptic disaster management game by Unicube. You have control over a family of four who are trying to survive in the bare wasteland after a nuclear disaster. Luckily they find a little wore down underground shelter which can be their new home. It’s your task to make sure your family survives in this post-apocalyptic world.
You start Sheltered by creating a family with two parents and two kids. You can do whatever you want: Want two dads and two daughters? No problem! Want a family of a dad a mom, a son and a little girl? Be my guest! The kids don’t even have to look like their parents. So if you want to do some role play and act as if the four found each other after the nuclear holocaust, you can do that. You can also give your family members a name, a number or preset stats and a positive trait. They will also end up getting a random weakness. This means you can end up with a “Street Smart” and courageous dad, called Dad, who is also pessimistic, and a “Smarty Pants”, optimistic girl, called Red, who is hands-off. Next to your four family members you can also choose and name pet: a red tabby cat or a German Shepard.
After creating a family, Sheltered will throw them into the wasteland, near an underground bunker. If you chose to play the tutorial you will have to help your family enter the vault and start up the power generator, which is a nice little touch. At first your shelter will look like hell, but as time will pass you will (hopefully) manage to make it look a little less like crap. Outside your shelter are an oxygen and water filter and also a camper van. I find that, the smartest thing to do after you have entered your new home, is to upgrade the workbench to tier two, fix and upgrade the power generator and air and water filter and craft a tier two bed, shower and toilet. You can also expand your shelter with some more rooms and even paint the rooms to make them look somewhat more appealing.
Your family has needs: food, water, sleep, bladder, hygiene. Now I have covered sleep, bladder and hygiene, how do you get food and water? You start off with ten cans of food on a provisions shelf and 15 water in a barrel. Food can be gathered by exploring, crafting traps and setting them up topside or by eating family members who have died. I never said surviving in a post-apocalyptic world was going to be easy. Water is gathered through the water filter when it rains and can also be found when exploring. Water is your most precious resourse so make sure you make a few extra barrels to store a ton of it.
Water so far has been my most valuable and most hated resource in Sheltered. Your family needs water to drink, the shower and toilet need water to function and expeditions also need water to make sure your family doesn’t get dehydrated in the wasteland. At one point I felt like Mad Max’s Immortan Joe, hording as much water as possible and preserving it for when disaster strikes. My family almost died, because it hadn’t rained in days. They couldn’t explore to get more water, because it needed water. They couldn’t shower which caused them to get food poisoning: eating food when having low hygiene is not a good thing. They became sick and puked all over the shelter and it just wasn’t a pleasant experience for all of us. Just as they were starting to demand water for drinking it started raining! I, and my followers, eh.. family, had never been so happy and I sent everyone to take a shower to make use of all that rain.
Being cooked up in a fallout shelter all day isn’t good for anybody, but luckily you can send your family on expeditions to explore the surrounding areas of the underground bunker. Exploring in Sheltered is the only way to find resources for crating and upgrading. An expedition is set up via a map hanging above the radio transmitter. At first the map is almost empty, you can only see where woods and mountains are, but building will appear on it as you explore the surrounding areas. You can send up to two people to go exploring and they need some water to do so. The further you send them venturing into the wasteland, the more water they need. If you send out more people they will be able to carry more items, but it will also cost you more water. You can also create satchels and backpacks for them to carry on their travels to make sure they can take more items back to the base. Oh, and remember the van outside your bunker? Well it needs a lot of parts, but if you manage to collect everything you can use it to explore faster!
While exploring through the wasteland of Sheltered you will encounter other people near buildings or just on the road. Some will be friendly and are willing to trade or even asking to join your shelter, but will make mean remarks if you decline. Others are not so friendly and will fight you. You will then have the option to fight back or flee. It’s best not to engage if your expedition party isn’t strong nor fast, because they will mostly end up dead.
I really liked playing Sheltered. It can be pretty hard in the beginning, mainly because of not enough water, but once you get going it’s a neat game. My shelter is growing steadily and I’ve started to take in more people. If you’ve hopped on the post-apocalyptic hype train, you should definitely check Sheltered out for yourself. Even if you don’t share the hype, check it out. It’s awesome.
