Project Mist is one of the more interesting Early Access titles I’ve reviewed in a while, if only because the game seems to have received a massive amount of initial hate and negative reviews, much of which I don’t think it deserves. It is one of those rare cases where I’m actually glad I got to play the game much later than intended, giving this small team’s latest title a try only after two large-scale patches had addressed many of the issues pointed out by its players. In doing so, I found a title that still has its issues but shows promise, partly due to its unique premise and partly to the clear dedication of its development team.
Project Mist is a mysterious, open-world survival-craft horror game in which you play as the surviving pilot of a crashed mech, awakening in the dangerous, utterly strange aftermath of an experiment gone wrong. With help from the narrator, a mysterious voice communicating and guiding you over the radio, it’s up to you to gather the resources necessary to explore and survive in a landscape shrouded in mist and plagued by monsters.
One of the very first things you’re bound to notice about Project Mist is that the game does use Unity Store assets, and more than a few of them. I want to go ahead and preface that I am not, in any way, against the use of purchased assets in any game; I think the market exists for a reason, and it wouldn’t be smart of any developer to avoid using them simply because they’re concerned about a few judgmental players, of which there certainly are.
What I will say about the use of pre-purchased assets, however, is that using a lot of them together gives your game a certain vibe. These assets are designed to be as stylistically neutral as possible, a strategy cleverly employed to encourage as many developers as possible to purchase them. If you want your assets to be stylistically generic, then that’s exactly what your game is going to feel like when you use them. It is this almost unsettling vibe of near-realism and “cheapness” that permeates throughout the game because of the developmental choices made, and I definitely think a lot of players are going to feel it too. I would say that Project Mist evokes a sort of old-school Source Engine mod feel without having quite the nostalgic charm of games like Cry of Fear that share that vibe.
That being said, Project Mist does keep its assets relatively thematically connected. Despite the almost uncanny feeling I mentioned before, you do get the impression that all of the game’s monsters belong in the world you find them in, and a cohesive narrative can be formed simply by observing many of the game’s creatures. This is less true for some creatures in the game, namely the more generic soldier zombies that, frankly, I think the game would be better off cutting altogether.
The crafting and survival base-building mechanics present in the game are almost so forgettable and unnecessary that I was left wondering if the game would be better off without them. I can’t think of a single time I benefited from actually building a base, as choosing to lock myself to any one location felt like a waste, and the commitment to building a base distracted me from actually engaging with the story and its missions, which have you walking around a lot and going into dungeon-like areas for extended periods of time.
Crafting tables and save locations were abundant throughout the environment, often in key locations, to the point where settling down anywhere to prepare resources for the task ahead felt like a foolish decision. I would say that the game plays much less like a survival-crafting game and more like Resident Evil, with the crafting system just made unnecessarily more complicated. I was still crafting healing items and bullets just before each important location, like I would have while exploring a linear level in a Resident Evil game.
While the survival mechanics aren’t great, the combat is actually pretty decent. It isn’t perfect; hitboxes aren’t great in melee, your stamina bar is super punishing, some attacks can feel needlessly punishing or outright kill you in one hit, and everything feels rather janky and unpolished, like you might expect in a game still in Early Access. That jankiness, however, feels workable rather than outright broken. I would once again compare the combat to that of a Source game, like Half-Life, and I actually found myself enjoying the overall nostalgic vibes that Project Mist gave me.
The gunplay is much better than the melee weapons, with solid punch to the weapons and good, clean animations that make your firearms feel useful and realistic. Bullets weren’t hard to come by either, but again, crafting them simply felt like a needlessly complicated take on the Resident Evil formula. I never felt the need to return to a home base to prepare ammo, and I rarely had to go out of my way to gather anything to keep my reserve full.
Since I chose to play the game later, many of the bugs Project Mist players faced on launch day weren’t present in my playthrough. Because of this, I had less of an infuriating, broken mess and instead got the impression of a simple, nostalgic, albeit uncanny and unpolished Early Access game that still has a lot of potential down the line. With the kind of attention the developers are showing it, I have full confidence that the game will continue to grow and become something far more polished and interesting than it is now.
That being said, it definitely needs to put in the work. The survival-crafting mechanics clash with how the game feels it’s meant to be played, with base building feeling like such an unnecessary afterthought that I outright refused to engage with the mechanic beyond my initial curiosity. Enemies still feel buggy, and combat is nostalgically clunky, in a way that doesn’t make the game unplayable but could still certainly be improved. The uncanny feeling the game gives off, due to its heavy use of generic, flipped assets, permeates deeply and is hard to ignore, but it is a feeling that many players likely won’t care about or will get over quickly enough.
Pros:
- A unique setting and world that you can’t help but be drawn into
- Nostalgic vibes and gameplay that harken back to titles like Cry of Fear
- A clearly dedicated and hard-working dev team that has already addressed many issues
Cons:
- Clunky gameplay that can be distracting with its problems, if not outright unplayable
- An overall uncanny feeling that you can’t shake due to the frequent use of generic, flipped assets
- Base-building and survival-craft mechanics clash hard with a game that feels like it wants to be played like a linear survival-horror game
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Project Mist. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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