About five hours into Icarus, the new survival game from Day Z’s Dean Hall and co, I had a moment. I’d just been savaged by a bear, and had morosely jogged back over to my corpse from the respawn drop ship several miles away. It was dark, and also stormy, and also there were more bears. I desperately needed to find and reclaim my pack, stuffed with meat, tools and building supplies, which was proving difficult because your corpse just appears as a small pile of excruciatingly indiscernible brown sandbags. As the minutes dragged on, my mind flashed back to the time I spent half an hour searching for my wireless earphones amidst gails of horizontal rain on Brighton beach, shivering and still half-soaked from a foolhardy morning swim. The experience was so horrible it transcended mere discomfort and turned into, on some level, genuinely enjoyable farce.
That’s Icarus, that is. It’s obviously flawed, wildly frustrating and frequently janky, but it’s also somehow simultaneously good enough to have kept me playing into the early morning on multiple nights without even realizing the time. It’s like Schrodinger's cat, except if the cat was a bear made of draining thirst meters. I went on to spend another 20 hours (mostly) happily within its grasp.
