《Prospice: Anomalous Logistics》宛如 SnowRunner，但运输的不是铜管而是邪神身体部件

God tier haul

Viewed from the front, my truck, with its winch and thick off-road tires, could be straight from SnowRunner central casting. Sure, it would an off-off-Broadway production of SnowRunner, with the polycount and texture resolution of a PS1-era take on the driving simulator, but I'm looking at a vehicle that is ready to struggle through thick mud and deep water; a petrol-guzzling workhorse.

Then I walk around the side and glimpse the load it's hauling: a giant severed hand, freshly cut from the corpse of a buried god.

Prospice: Anomalous Logistics has all the markings of SnowRunner, MudRunner and Spintires games, the driving simulators with a focus on overcoming difficult off-road terrain, but it's seen through the lens of eldritch horror and the new weird.

Unlike the horror movies that keep their monsters out of shot for the first half, letting audiences stew on the possible, Prospice has no qualms about putting them front and centre. The demo opens with you facing a chap in a white hazmat suit, the black eyes and mask looking almost like a bemused smile, while over his shoulder you can see the rotting corpse of a humanoid creature. If the thing were standing it would easily tower over you, three or four storeys tall.

You mustn't look too closely, mind. Stare at the remains too long and a bar appears at the bottom of your HUD. Let it fill and your 'Life pattern fractures', or, put another way, you get deaded by means of insanity. Besides, you shouldn't be hanging about the eldritch corpse anyway, you've a job to do.

You're one of the Fenrir Directive's Pathfinders. The shady government-funded group that has operational control over the Nastrondey Island, charged with investigating the occult-y goings ons, and the Pathfinders are the delivery drivers that ferry all the staff, equipment, and "findings" between bases. Apparently, Fenrir Directive tried doing this work with remote vehicles and ran into quite a few technical problems, so they now rely on good old fashioned humans.

Which brings me back to the truck and its load. I'm to drive it to a research station for drop off.

Behind the wheel of the truck, Prospice really does feel a lot like SnowRunner. You've got to disengage the parking brake, move between high and low gears, and manually shift into reverse. You can also switch into All-Wheel-Drive when you hit particularly steep or muddy terrain. Though, as in Saber's driving games, through everything you need to keep an eye on your fuel gauge. Though, at least from what I've seen in the demo, the dangers of running out of fuel are significantly higher in Prospice.

As someone who has sunk a lot of hours into the mud of Spintires, SnowRunner, and MudRunner, driving over the deforming terrain in Prospice captures that same laborious-yet-satisfying physicality. The soil gives way under your vehicle, leaving deep treadmarks in your wake. Any time you need to cross deep water there is a risk of getting stuck in the silt. Still, if you do become wedged somewhere, you can hop out of the truck, unwind your winch, and look for a good spot to plant its anchor, before pulling yourself out of the quagmire. I don't think Prospice's fantastical elements would work so well without that attention to the muscular reality of the driving.

Where Prospice leaves its source behind and drives into new territory is by introducing uncertainty into your tools. Pressing tab will bring up a map with a marker showing your position, but it's often inaccurate. The signal you send and receive to the nearby triangulation towers warping on its journey. At one point I was driving along a riverside track, hauling a crate to a distant hill. On the map, my locator was showing me far across the river in a distant field. A tutorial pop up makes clear you will need to rely on landmarks to keep your bearings.

The cargo I carried also helps with the mapping issue. It was something called a Navspire, a staff I can plant in the ground that appears as a market on the map. Unlike my signal, that can bounce around, these are reliable humanmade landmarks to track your position. At first, I thought the device was just a stick with a warm green light on top, but as I look closer it also seems to be strung with bones that catch the wind as it blows. Best not to question the mechanics of these devices too much, they do the job.

Another departure from Saber's games is that you can get out of the vehicle and walk around the world. Though, the further you get from your truck the weaker your signal gets and the fuzzier your screen becomes until it's virtually impossible to see what's in front of you. On one excursion where I just couldn't mount the hill, even with the help of low gear, all-wheel drive, and the winch, I got out and walked. Up the hilltop, I could make out a glowing red spot in the distance, but as I moved nearer to the object and further from the truck, my vision deteriorated. When I was close enough to pick it up I could barely make it out, but as I walked back my vision cleared and I saw I was holding a red marble: a teardrop of a god.

A demo is only a glimpse of a game, but this combination of off-road driving and weird fiction immediately worked for me. Even though I had one frustrating moment where I got irretrievably stuck on top of a rock and had to restart from my last save, I still came away hooked on seeing more of this world and what horrors I'll uncover in the full game.