FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Peter Molyneux’s ‘The Trail’

The Trail

The latest game from Kongregate and Peter Molyneux’s 22cans is “The Trail”, an iOS/Android mobile game where you play as an explorer who sets off from home to settle down in the revered “Eden Falls”.

It’s fair to say that some gamers might recoil when they hear the words “Peter Molyneux” and “mobile game” used in the same sentence, but as bad a reputation as Molyneux may have among some fans, The Trail is definitely worth some of your time, especially considering the fact that it’s free to play. The game’s artwork/animation and soundtrack are, in my opinion, worth freeing up some phone space for alone.

Your objective in The Trail is simple: keep walking until you reach your destination, Eden Falls, and pick up items to craft supplies along the way. There are a few other objectives and obstacles (which get more difficult and more complex, the further you progress in the game) but that’s your basic goal. You also have the opportunity to trade items with other players in real-time at each camp you stop at, which is one of my favourite aspects of the game. This, along with the fact that these players will pass you by on the road, and can even send you simple, pre-programmed greetings/taunts, is what took me by surprise in The Trail.

I assumed that I would be alone in this world, just me and the NPCs which give me quests and tips, but there’s something special about seeing people from all over the world journeying together with you to the mysterious Eden Falls. It takes away some of the loneliness of travel, and makes your rest-stops at camps more sociable and interactive. You all have a common goal in this game, reaching the same destination, and it really adds to the game’s sense of pioneering and mass exploration when you’re jogging along the road with a bunch of people who live miles away from you in real life. You may have all started from different places, but you’ll end up living together in the same land, and there’s something quite comforting about the fact that you travel and camp with people who are exploring the same path as yours.

Unfortunately, being a free-to-play mobile game means that The Trail comes loaded with microtransactions, where you can purchase “Favours” (with real-life money) to spend on better equipment, or to speed up your journey time. You can also watch adverts to “earn” some items, which for me, is one of the things that throws me completely out of the immersive experience of the game. Certainly, 22cans has attempted to make this a plausible aspect of the game by having the ads be offered to you by a colourful-looking woman with a billboard who stops you on the road, but it’s hard to really immerse yourself into a frontier lifestyle when you have to sit through thirty seconds of an ad for a crappy-looking Clash of Clans knockoff.

The Trail is a soothing and immersive game where you can explore nature with a calming soundtrack, but is a game which is also packed full of enough activities and objectives to keep it from becoming too dull. I wish the developers had chosen a paid model instead of the free-to-play one, in order to keep microtransactions out of an otherwise immersive game, but unfortunately, this is a common enough feature of modern mobile gaming that it’s hard for me to really expect anything else.

Available on: iOS | Android

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