Pc Gaming's Best Inventory System Is Hidden In This Obscure...

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

What's the best inventory system in PC gaming? Resident Evil 4's grid-based briefcase has certainly echoed through the generations, though you could argue it simply builds upon work done in PC games like Deus Ex and System Shock 2. A cursory Internet search also brings up suggestions like Minecraft for its simplicity, and Death Stranding for how deeply inventory management is intertwined with the core experience.

All of these are great for their own reasons, but for my money, juggling stuff in your backpack has never been better than as depicted in Neo Scavenger. Released in 2014, this survival roguelike is in many ways Inventory Management: The Game. That probably sounds awful, and would be, were it not for how ingeniously devised it is.

If you're unfamiliar with Neo Scavenger, it bears some similarity to games like Caves of Qud and UnReal World. Playing as a survivor who awakes from a coma in an abandoned research facility, you must make your way across a hex-based world, searching for resources and dealing with wildlife, monsters, and other survivors as you try to figure out who you are and what the hell happened.

I love everything about Neo Scavenger. I love the cloying atmosphere it conjures out of a few static sprites, some synthy music, and a sprinkling of birdsong. I love the deceptive depth to its text-based combat, which fully accommodates melee fighting, ranged combat, stealth, and specific actions like dodge-rolling and taking cover. I love the tension built into every action you take, from deciding whether to search an area quietly and risk missing items, or more thoroughly, which may attract potential threats through the noise it makes.

Of course, what I love most about Neo Scavenger is its inventory system, which simulates space and scale and personal storage to a level of detail I simply haven't seen anywhere else. Like all the best inventory systems, Neo Scavenger's is grid-based, with items taking up a realistic amount of space relative to their size. Where Neo Scavenger diverges from most games, however, is that the size of your inventory is designed to reflect a human being's carrying

Source: PC Gamer