Once Human Preview: Hands On With Steam’s 11th Most-Wanted Game
In my Once Human demo, things got really weird when I wanted to ride the bus. And that's because the bus had legs. In a post-apocalyptic open world where an outbreak of cosmic energy called Stardust has sent everything a little wacky, even the public transport is bonkers.
Once Human is currently Steam’s 11th most-wishlisted game – a multiplayer open-world survival game in which players can battle creatures or each other, build and defend shared territories, indulge in OTT combat or just chill with friends at their base. Ahead of its final closed beta test (which starts April 3) and planned Q3 launch, the development team at Starry Studio gave me a private glimpse at what’s to come.
But first, back to the bus. Once Human’s monsters are a fantastical nightmare of Lovecraftian creature design, organic-machine hybrids with weird and wonderful forms that can be dangerous or useful. The bus is the latter – essentially a benevolent monster that will not harm the player, although it may inadvertently trample the base you foolishly built in its path. You can ride the bus for safe passage, with scheduled routes along bus stops throughout the Nalcott Continent’s massive open-world map. When it arrives, it might already have a contingent of Deviant baddies on board, whom you have to quickly kill before clambering aboard, presenting an element of risk and reward.
The walking bus encounter is weird, fun and densely constructed, itself a microcosm of what to expect from a game that lets players do pretty much anything. While Once Human has a story and a path of main missions, you can ignore these completely and play at your own pace.
Peng “Victoria” Sun, Once Human’s world and content designer, explains, “We want the game itself to be fascinating. Everyone loves the bus, and the monster designs and the gameplay designs are already proving intriguing to people.”
The upcoming CBT will be a scaled-up version of what we’ve seen so far, with up to 150,000 participants compared with the
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