It’s a strange phenomenon but even the most boring, mundane, soul-destroying tasks become engaging and motivating when transferred from real-life to game. Take tidying up for example. For most people (and there are some exceptions), tidying is not something we are willing to dedicate hours of our lives to. But plant us in front of a screen, stick an Xbox controller in our hands and many of us will quite happily spend our precious time picking up rubbish, sucking up toxic waste and removing old fishing nets. If this sounds like you, then Fresh Start could be worth a play.
In Fresh Start, you travel to various places around the world where nature has been destroyed because of human activity. It’s your job as a kind of environmental cleaner to tidy everything up so nature can return.
Your basic tools include a water stream, which you use to break up rubbish-containing piles of mud (not a common environmental problem we’re aware of). You’ll also use it to water dried up plants to bring them back to life. You also have a nifty hoover to suck up the offending rubbish, once released from the mud, and water from obliging puddles, rivers and oceans to fill up your water tank.
Each location, set in different parts of the world with its own unique set of problems, also presents you with a variety of quests, such as collecting parts to mend defunct pieces of machinery, destroying animal traps and feeding a feline train driver.
Collecting rubbish, and depositing it into a recycling machine, as well as watering plants, will earn you experience points, the in-game currency, which you can use to level up your abilities and equipment following a nifty skills tree. And this can’t happen soon enough, as the capacity of your water tank at the start of the game is painfully small, which causes you to spend far too much time running to collect more water and not enough time tidying.
However, even in progressing up the tree, you won’t notice much of a difference in capacity at first. This was a major initial annoyance as it interrupts the zen-like flow of watering and hoovering. There are other abilities you can unlock, such as robots that will collect rubbish or water plants in a defined radius, as well as being able to increase the power of your water stream and hoover.
You can also gain the ability to scan the area for plants that need watering by using a quick tap up on the directional pad, and a pocket recycler, which stops the need to visit the recycling machine to empty your collection of rubbish, and clears your limited inventory for other items you need to collect for quests. However, akin to supermarket reward schemes, it takes a lot of time and rubbish to gain enough XP to reach levels that make any significance to gameplay and speed up how long it takes to remove mud and water plants.
As you proceed through each level, sucking up rubbish and bringing the plants back to life, you restore nature, shown as a percentage. Each third of the way through you’re rewarded with a short cut scene showing the return of some cute animals and a few experience points. As nature returns, the location becomes greener, there are more animals and the rivers turn from a murky grey to an inviting blue. Once all your quests are done, and nature is at 95%, you can leave the location and move onto the next, shown as your journey around a world map. But, if you are anywhere near a perfectionist you’ll be looking to stay in hope of finding every last plant and bit of rubbish in order to get 100%.
You’ll have to do a fair bit of moving around in Fresh Start as you unblock new paths by removing mud piles and hunting for dry plants and the parts you need to complete quests. Upon starting Fresh Start we found movement to be jerky and turning around is akin to trying to three point turn a bus, However, the settings do allow you to adjust the sensitivity in the controls, something we only realised after a few hours of playing. To help you on your way, there is also the option of ‘sprinting’, i.e. moving slightly more quickly, and jumping to clear low lying obstacles.
The graphics are simple and animations repetitive – evident when viewing a flock of puffins to see the same head-bobbing movement over and over again. Some animals – like the wolves – don’t bother moving at all, and a more life-like quality to the game would have made the environmental message it carries resonate more. The music is reasonably unobtrusive, but the settings allow you to turn off the music to enjoy the satisfying clunk as you release the rubbish; all you need to match the mind-numbing tasks you’re carrying out. And we mean this in a good way, Fresh Start is a relaxing game that requires no brain power and at no point was there even a trickle of adrenaline released into our bloodstream.
As this is a game set in nature we would have appreciated a little more in terms of nature sounds, a babbling brook, bird song and rustling leaves.
Each level takes place in a new part of the world, with its distinctive flora, fauna and quests. For example, you’ll get to remove pools of toxic waste, shift out old fishing nets and free the whales in Iceland (mistakenly located as Greenland on the map) and helping pandas in a flooded landscape in China. Locations vary in size, some taking longer to complete because of more quests and a larger area to explore. Despite these differences, the gameplay quickly becomes very repetitive, as you spend the vast majority of your time spraying and sucking, running to collect more water and collecting items for the quests. We would have liked to have seen some bigger differences between the levels, and something more to look forward to as progress through Fresh Start is made.
You should enjoy Fresh Start for what it is – a simple game that numbs the mind for an hour or two. But the fundamental lack of excitement means it doesn’t entice enough to warrant much of a return. The potential is there, but there’s nothing under the surface. We would have liked to have seen some kind of narrative – who are you and why have you been set this task? What is your reward? And who the hell is leaving massive mud piles full of rubbish around the world?
