Previews

Hands-on with The Trail: the new game from Peter Molyneux

Running up that hill

Hands-on with The Trail: the new game from Peter Molyneux
|
iOS
| The Trail

At first glance, The Trail - the new game from Godus developer Peter Molyneux - looks kind of like an endless runner. A bit like Temple Run, only set in a picturesque, postcard valley.

Your hero runs along a fixed path, as the camera lingers behind your back, just like a million endless runners on iOS.

The similarities end there, though. There are no pits to jump or obstacles to avoid, you can change your speed from a sprint to an amble, and you can even swing the camera around to see the game from a different angle.

So, what do you actually do while on the trail? You collect stuff. Pine cones, feathers, rocks, twigs, bits of wool, and clumps of fur. You tap on them and drag them to your sack. Eventually you'll be able to chop away at trees to get wooden logs.

Your sack isn't split into nice neat pockets, though: your stuff wobbles about, topples over the edges, and a stick elbows a pine cone to make room.

There's something tactile and fun about managing your goodies.

Inventory

When you make it to the next camp (or, should I say, if you make it - you have a stamina bar and you'll collapse if you don't eat) you can turn your scraps of stuff into items. Perhaps handy tools like an axe, or better clothes to improve your stamina, or stuff simply to sell.

Selling stuff happens in a weird shopping mini-game where you - and other characters - dump unwanted items onto a conveyer belt. A conveyer belt that leads to a big gnashing blender that crushes your item.

If you want to make lots of money, you better hope someone grabs the item before it falls into that toothy maw.

What's not clear is whether the other shoppers are real people. On the trail you'll see other characters with names that make it sound like they're other players. They'll also be picking up objects, and will sometimes collapse - letting you nick their stuff.

It's all very mercenary.

Mercenary

The idea of the game is to make it to a town called Eden Falls. Who knows what you'll do when you get there. Hopefully it's a better reward than Molyneux's other game: Curiosity, where the grand prize was the disappointment of a man.

So for now, you'll just have to craft a hat which gives you more stamina, so you can pick up more stuff, so you can craft a hat, which… well, you get the idea. An endless loop of making stuff that lets you get better at making stuff, without ever really changing the gameplay.

Throw in some good old fashioned microtransactions to speed up the process and you've got a pretty typical mobile game.

But, hey, it looks nice. As long as you don't mind walking down a linear path for hours. The Trail is available now in The Philippines. We'll let you know when it's out worldwide.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer