Carrier Trail

Ugh. 17 positive reviews right now and every single one of them is complete BS, as is this game. It's nothing but an overly simplistic text game because the graphics are horrible. The text events that happen are 100% RNG and you'd be better off just making up random stupid events in your head and rolling dice to see if you live, die, or how much health you lose. BOTTOM LINE: This is NOT "fun" at all and this game would have been not played in 1982 if it were free. Asking $5 USD for this today is beyond laughable. MY SCORE: 1 out of 10. Do you wish to try and add points to my score? {Y}es or {N}o? ..Your attempt to add points to my score fails and blows up in your face! You are Dead and my score remains a 1 out of 10! My score above pretty much sums up this overly simplistic and terrible RNG / Text game! NOT RECOMMENDED.. At least you saw one "honest" review.. GG. Now go find an actual 'good' game to spend your hard earned money on. ..This is definitely not it!

Carrier Trail is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Oregon Trail (Copyright Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Carrier Trail is considerably worse than Oregon Trail. Just like Oregon Trail, this is an RNG stat grinder as you progress from step to step, each step triggering a random event which makes you make a decision or otherwise erodes the set of stats you have to juggle as you progress through the game. Simple stuff, the gaming industry moved on from games like Oregon Trail decades ago, except for a few holdouts hoping for some kind of viral success …

I generally like this game. However there are some small problems that mess up the game's enjoyability. Most of the game's difficulty comes from the wild RNG, which can screw you over and save your life in one or two turns. For example, I was robbed of all my gold and attacked on my first turn, but then randomly got five free gold at the first town. Also, the gambling function doesn't really work. I had five gold and won four, and my gold count went down to four.

I backed this game on Kickstarter (backer #79) and I am so glad I did. This game is a fun cute little game. I have played thru several times and have yet to play the same story twice. Its cute, its fun, its worth the price.

Game still needs some testing, unfortunately. During my two hour run, I had the game crash out on me twice, dumping me back to Windows. I was still able to eventually complete the game, only to discover that currently none of the achievements seem to even work. I saw a couple of the "random events" three or more times, and I saw maybe five or six events at least twice, leaving me to feel there isn't nearly as much randomness here as it first seems. I don't see an update history on Steam for this game, so I'm guessing none of this will probably change. I wish the game removed events from the "pool" after they happened so they didn't reoccur constantly. Outside of that the game does have a surprise or two up it's sleeve and it has a sense of humor as well, which I like. Maybe I'll come back to it if it ever gets an update...but outside of that I cannot really recommend it at the moment.

This is a fun little take on the Oregon Trail type formula of journeying with limited supplies. The game is a little tongue in cheek, though there are some more dramatic moments. There's a wide variety of events in between towns and landmarks that are always the same. This is definitely a fun game that's good for a couple afternoons of adventuring in a crazy crazy land.