Caravan
Caravans are such a great premise for a game. They’re inherently full of adventure and the unknown, tension and resolution, goals and setbacks. I grew up playing Oregon Trail and Amazon Trail, and I’m always looking to recapture that same sense of adventure and exploration.
Caravan should have worked. Caravan should have been a natural fit. Caravan was not.
Mr. Snark and I quietly contemplating the futility of existence
In Caravan, you play as the prince of the Pillars of Iram, a city beset by a djinn’s curse. Your task is to travel around Arabia, trading and gaining support to break the djinn’s curse and retake your throne. Fundamentally, though, it is a caravan game, where you buy and sell commodities for profit, have encounters on the road, and survive your most profitable venture. The game includes a minigame for combat and haggling, but the bulk of it is in choosing a route, choosing goods, and adventuring.
The minigame. We’ll talk about it. Oh, we’ll talk about it.
As I said, on the surface, the game is sound. It’s when you start digging into the individual elements that the entire thing crumbles like a sandcastle beneath a stiff wind.
First, let’s talk about the minigame. The screenshot above gives a good visualisation of it. Each character has three traits, which beat each other rock-paper-scissors style. The red numbers indicate by how much the player is losing, and the green numbers by how much they are winning. Dice are added to values to boost them, and then damage is dealt based on the accumulated points.
Except, in the combat above, there is no way for my character to win. There was no way, prior to starting this combat, to know I couldn’t possibly win, and once I’m in it, no way to say “oopsie duckie” and skedaddle. Once combat starts, I am committed to having my character killed. Similarly, when I do find an encounter on my level, it is ludicrously easy. This minigame, which sits at the heart of the game, vacillates between “stomp” or “get stomped.” When one of the core mechanics of the game is wildly broken, it bodes ill for the game as a whole.
The kicker of it, though, is that the minigame isn’t necessary. While the rest of the caravan elements get a bit repetitive, they are solid caravan survival elements. By adding this minigame, the game was made actively worse, as it shifts the balance from management to tedious slogging to grind up the profits to buy the skillset to actually win.
There’s a lot right in this screenshot.
Coupled with the frustration of the minigame is the actual tedium of caravanning. The caravan mechanic of buy low sell high is very much in place here, which is great, but that’s all there is. The encounters along the way are repetitive and identical, and grinding up to buy a skillset gets tedious. The game understands the ideas of how to be a caravan game, but not the actual execution.
Caravan is beautifully drawn and animated, and the setting is a fun one. I wish the gameplay elements matched it.
Developer: It Matters Games
Genre: Strategy, Adventure
Year: 2016
Country: Germany
Language: English
Play Time: 9 Hours