Lost in the Fog.
Foglands, as it is, is an interesting package. It's not only a rogue-like VR experience, but it also allows its gameplay to additionally be enjoyed without the need for Sony's expensive VR headset. While both ways to play may suit the needs of its player, Foglands sadly brings nothing new to the table to warrant much attention. It has its moments, but they are sadly too few alongside one of the most repetitive games I’ve ever played.
Foglands places you in the boots of a man named Jim, a man given the task of being a runner. As humanity has been forced to retreat underground, supplies are few and far between, making the need for folk like Jim to track down anything and everything he can get his hands on. That said, it's more of a plot device to place you in a position where you'll travel to strange locations repeatedly as you complete your primary objective; gather scrap.
While the central plot is to stop an uncontrollable monster from wiping out your settlement, this mission has you tracking down scrap to spend on getting further on your current run or sending it back to stockpile for the next one. However, before Jim can settle into his rinse-and-repeat lifestyle, he first needs to die. During your initial outing, Jim will die a pretty horrible death. That said, a strange man then resurrects Jim and makes it known that should he ever die again, at least until he destroys that monster, that Jim will come back to life to repeat his objectives upon each death. Again, this is a rogue-like, so the ability to return to life to start again is what the genre is primarily known for, but it's also nice to at least have a narrative reason for why it is happening. And why did this stranger pick Jim, you ask? Well, you'll need to play to find out.
Before your first death, you'll have the option of running through a brief tutorial, one that explains a few basic things, but not enough to make your first few runs that easy to understand. Oddly enough, there is a tutorial menu that does contain some crucial tidbits not covered in the playable tutorial, which is a shame since the most important instructions are present here, explaining a great deal of the actual rogue-like components that make up this fairly short 3-4 hour rogue-like journey. Again, it's bizarre that this information needs to be found in the menus rather than the game’s opening tutorial.
Each run into the depths will garner you several rewards and progression systems to ensure you are getting the most out of your time. There are Runner Keys that allow access to special runner lockers in the lookout, which is your overall bland base of operations. These lockers can unlock a new stranger card that you can collect and use on each run, or a runner map that unlocks secret rooms somewhere in the foglands. Stranger cards are mid-run upgrades that grant you perks such as additional health, more damage to your thrown weapons, or bonus melee resistance. These cards are found in purple chests that you’ll occasionally find in the depths and last for that particular run.
One issue I had with these cards is that there was not a single prompt or tutorial on how to use them as I had to press every button on the controller to figure out that holding RT was how you used the card. Since the was no controller button mapping menu or anything of the sort, It was left up to me to figure it out. And to this day, I still have no idea how to check the cards I’ve unlocked or even how to check how much ammo reserves I have apart from the menu that pops up when I find additional ammo or scrap. It’s bizarre how so much of this game is left to discover on your own for even the most simplistic things like how much ammo you have or what button does what.
Another small annoyance is that you cannot back out of menus with O and instead have to click the back or resume buttons. I also had issues with not being able to scroll up from the bottom tutorial button as it would always get stuck on the back button. There are also left and right buttons on the pause screen that don’t do anything. I’ve pressed every single button I can and there doesn’t appear to be a way to toggle those pages. Is this where I can check my available cards? My equipment? I have no idea.
Each run is designed around recovering scrap, but you’ll also track down ichor that can be used to increase your health, weapons, and abilities. Thankfully, these are permanent upgrades. While I’ve seen that some chests can drop them, you also get a few from defeating bosses. And since the first boss is likely to get stuck and not move, you can reliably farm them from him and max out your stats as you begin to make a real effort to push through to the other few bosses. And don’t you worry, this isn’t an occasional glitch, I’ve had the first boss just stop moving altogether each and everytime I have fought him, allowing me to easily clear out the mobs that flood around him and just stand there and shoot him until he dies. All in all, I’ve killed him likely 30 times with no effort.
From your standard pistol to a wrench, your options for combat mainly come in a range variety to a few melee options. The problem is that both rarely feel good to use. I’ve had direct shots with the pistol not registering, to slamming the melee button down and clearly hitting my target, but to find my efforts rarely find purchase on whatever I am hitting. Whether this is the result of poor hit detection or the hitboxes being too small, I don’t know. All I can say is that both shooting and melee just don’t feel good enough to carry you through. This is the same thing with all grenades as enemies often don’t stay in one place to benefit from them and seeing a group of unsuspecting monsters take zero damage from a well-aimed grenade made me simply refrain from even buying or equipping any of them, ever.
When not playing in VR, aiming feels slow, almost as if the game is running at 30fps. It never feels fluid as I find myself having to make micro-adjustments in aiming at targets that are high above, such as is the case in the first boss encounter when he has these spheres shooting out projectiles at you. I rarely feel like I can reliably aim at them while moving and usually have to stand entirely still to even hit them. While it’s easier to shoot in VR, the non-VR option should be just as enjoyable and it just isn’t, simply due to how janky it feels.
As each run is procedurally generated, it can be really easy to get lost, especially as some rooms within the same run will feature the same parts and pieces, especially a transition room when 3 steps and a partition. This particular room is constantly present, sometimes several times on the same floor. The hallway transition screens also change lighting and tone as you walk through them, often changing to entirely different feeling locations as they load the next room.
While you can find maps that lead to additional areas, the fact that you are merely going to locations you have seen a dozen times before doesn’t make them appealing. While the areas after each boss due change in their aesthetic, having to replay the same rooms over and over in each run really sucks the fun out of any sort of discovery of things you haven’t seen before. In fact, you’ll see every single room type in a single run and I wish that wasn’t the case.
As you collect scrap to spend within that run or to send it back up for use later, scrap will automatically pull towards you when you get near it. However, for some reason, ammo will not. Since ammo is absolutely essential to your run and to your very survival, I don’t understand why ammo won’t automatically fly to you. This would make boss encounters more manageable as you don’t have to awkwardly stare at the ground and move the janky cursor around to grab it or having to reach down in VR and pick up each ammo cartridge on its own. It’s such a bizarre design choice that I hope can be addressed in some sort of QOL update to the game.
While I have several additional annoyances with The Foglands, I’ll end this review with two that constantly plagued my sessions. When you encounter lockers later on, you’ll sometimes have to blast off the lock that keeps them shut. Personally, I really liked this. However, in order to see the contents of that locker, you have to fully open the door to even see their contents appear. If you open it slightly and see nothing in it, you might get the idea that there is nothing there. It took me a while to realize that the items only materialize if the door is fully open. Lastly, the default walking speed is atrocious and thankfully, you can auto-toggle the run speed which can sometimes feel too fast but it’s night and day better than the sluggish default speed the game currently has.
Visually, The Foglands more than serves its function. It’s not the most incredible VR game I’ve ever seen, even when not playing in VR, but its Western meets sci-fi style is still decent enough to make me want to know more about its world. I think the story bits that are there are fine with the occasional character to interact with, but the world and its interactable elements are decent enough to engage with without being anything you haven’t seen a hundred times before.
Part of why the rogue-likes genre is so popular is that it makes each subsequent run to be enticing for players to discover new locations, enemies, and loot. However, The Foglands doesn’t provide a satisfying loop to add to the appeal of the genre. With a game like Hades or Dead Cells, I always had that “one more run” obsession that would see me playing it for hours more. With little to no variety upon each run, with the same rooms and enemies, as well as fighting the controls at almost every corner, I had zero incentive to dive back in for another run after I wrapped credits here. It’s a shame that The Foglands is the experience it is because I feel there is a solid foundation to make this a compelling series. However, as it is right now, it’s repetitive, fairly bland, and lacks the obsession to take on one more run.
Developer - Well Told Entertainment, Well Told Entertainment, LLC Publisher - Well Told Entertainment, Well Told Entertainment, LLC Released - October 31st, 2023. Available On - PlayStation 5, PSVR2, Windows. Rated - (M) Blood, Strong Language, Violence.
Platform Reviewed - PS5/PSVR 2. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.