I Am Future: Cozy Apocalypse Survival – PS5 Review

I Am Future or to give it its full name, I Am Future: Cozy Apocalypse Survival comes to us from developer Mandragora and publisher Tinybuild. Mandragora being based in Armenia with a globally spread team. That’s a thing now we guess. The full title is fairly descriptive of what to expect. Think Animal Crossing mixed with the latest iteration of The Sims and you’d be part of the way there.

You awake on a rooftop surrounded by water in the distant future. An artificial moon has got too close to the earth and flooded everywhere. If we didn’t know better, we’d swear this was a tie-in to The Cub or Highwater, the setting being so similar. You’re in suspended animation until suddenly, you aren’t. It’s not much more than a framing device to plunge you into a landscape where you’re left to effectively fend for yourself.

I Am Future tries gamely to ease you into matters, but despite everything, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed. A crucial early point that we managed to miss was the fact that you access your build menu via the DualSense touch bar. It’s a bit annoying and made for a few early incapacitations all the more galling by our inability to have avoided them.

The core gameplay loop is disassemble items to get raw materials, grow plants, access new areas and continue. It’s metroidvaniaish in terms of areas being gated beyond your current ability. Only in another annoying omission, I Am Future is frustratingly oblique in terms of another key mechanic. You have to upgrade your workstations at regular intervals. This is all well and good but very badly explained. Part of the problem is the UI.

At best it is functional, at other times its functionality is oblique at best. It proved far too easy to miss the upgrade tab. This isn’t helped by inconsistent application of the games own rules. On later workstations you have an upgrade tooltip available, but for the most part it is a little tab at the top.

Going into the game on PS5 rather than the original PC was no doubt something of a hindrance, but even PC gamers had problems with this in the early access phase on Steam. The UI probably works just fine on PC, but when you’re navigating with the thumbsticks, the selection box doesn’t snap to the current window. Not great.

Not to mention, the further you get into the game, stuttering makes itself know with noticeable animation lag upon going into a crafting station or inventory. Talking of lag, you’re encouraged to go on expeditions for the purposes of foraging and adding a couple of essential NPCs to the fray. The load times going into the expeditions are fine, but the delay when coming back home is such that you can comfortably go boil the kettle or make a flask of weak lemon drink. Never mind that the NPCs take up space on your drone and nowhere is it mentioned that you have to go into a submenu to move them elsewhere.

Early doors we got stuck into the tasks we could crack on with like fishing and foraging, but by doing the latter, our only available food source was raw ingredients such as blueberries, biomass, mushrooms & flowers. This was all well and good but we soon found out the finite lifespan this yielded. You see, your energy runs out quicker than the plants regrow. And when your energy reaches zero, your health decreases in turn. Zero health means you pass out. It’s bit infuriating when you realise that you’ve been locked out of a couple of trophies due to this.

This lack of clarity is a common occurrence throughout I Am Future and proves our main gripe throughout. All too often you’ll hit an area, only to be told that you can’t access it due to not having the right tool. Upon going ino the crafting menu at a workbench, you’ll be given the ingredients, but it’ll remain frustratingly vague until you miraculously find a quest item. Or you’re given the opportunity to arbitrarily visit an otherwise inaccessible location.

When you think you’ve hit your stride in one area and are making great headway, I Am Future has the knack for outright killing any impetus otherwise. Artificial scarcity of items is a mean-spirited way to stop you progressing further. One particular annoyance was an essential item that we were informed about via a radio message, but when we got to the vendor in question, said item was out of stock, even though we were literally the only customer in town.

On the bright side though, the gameplay, although busywork in the Animal Crossing tradition, is engaging enough. Early on, your main tasks are to deal with nighttime weevil incursions while tending to your vegetable plots.  At the outset you’ll be focussed on getting rid of them, but as you upgrade your garden you can repel them with ultraviolet lights. As long as you keep power flowing to them, it’s all good gravy.

Running around and finding the necessary materials to upgrade your machinery is most of the fun here. It’s better than it sounds. You can eventually build a bunch of robots to do your bidding for you. As long as you keep them in repair kits and raw materials for you, they’ll run around doing busywork for you while you get down to exploring.

Your main tools are the saw, the drill and the hammer. As you progress, you’ll gain raw materials from disassembling items that block your way to the next area, though you’ll soon get stopped by an obstacle that impedes you.

All of your tools can be upgraded as you progress, but all to often they’re locked behind a deus ex machina that you can’t easily bypass. The worst example was getting a saw upgrade to tackle a bulky robot blocking our path. Then we immediately needed the drill upgrade. And in turn the hammer upgrade. The crappiest bait and switch we’ve faced in quite a while there.

Despite this, we’ve still put over forty hours into this. It beats actual work if we’re honest. In conclusion, the niggles pale into insignificance after a while and it’s what you make of it. I Am Future’s subtitle fees entirely superfluous, but there we are. It’s alright and that’s fine. The UI and performance issues are a bit annoying, but we guess that’s down to the game trying to enumerate all the additional things you’ve added. It could explain key mechanics a lot better and your path to progression is often very unclear,  but you’ll work past them. We did anyway.