Sheltered

If you’ve ever wanted to experience life in a post-apocalyptic shelter, you’re in for a treat. Sheltered is a video game that provides all the rusty bells and broken whistles needed to simulate the experience of running one of humanity’s last sanctuaries. However, that’s just what we’re told on paper. Does it actually stack up to be depressingly exciting? Or, do we get another mundane “grind for tools and die” experience? Well, it’s time to dig in and find out!

A Simple Premise

Sheltered doesn’t weigh you down with a long sequence of opening credits, explaining how things got this way. No. Instead, you’re going to have to commit to one goal. Survive. Survive for as long as you possibly can. You start out with the chance to customize each of the family members in your little ol’ shelter. This is one of the highlights of the game. Getting to live out your post-apocalyptic fantasies right from the start with a decent character creator.

Playing with a family of five, you’ll get two parents, two kids and a family pet. Sheltered allows you to personalize the looks of each of these family members. You can choose their names, gender, clothes and abilities. Just like The Sims… if your Sims were desperately trying to survive right from the day of their creation.

Although you’re probably psyched to mess around with the character creator, there’s a subtle psychological trick you need to be aware of. By personalizing these characters, you’ll undoubtedly feel indebted towards keeping them alive. Vice versa, sadly, you’ll also be really heartbroken to lose any of these guys if they happen to pass away.

The perfectly chaotic gameplay loop

Sheltered is a game that tosses you into an unpredictable sequence of events. But first, you’ll need to deal with a scenario that tests your strategic prowess. Don’t be shocked if your first few attempts are unable to put you past 15 days. For some playthroughs, you’ll be swimming in items and resources. It’ll almost feel like Christmas at the start. For other, you might find your fictional family depressingly scraping through old houses for a tinge of old tools. That’s the beauty of Sheltered.

But even more attracting is the quiet sense of drama to the lives of your survivors. You’ll get to meet other survivors around the wasteland. In such scenarios, you can choose to talk to them, get robbed, shoot people, and investigate houses. Essentially, you’ll find yourself basking in the atmosphere for a while.

Even with the availability of customization, some players may find it lacking to develop connections to the characters they’ve created. Unlike in a game like XCOM 2, the character sprites here might not be enough for an emotional attachment to the fictional family members.

Pros

• Interesting Gameplay
• Randomly Generated

Cons

• Lack of balance to RNG