Memory Wastes Review: A Free-to-Play Text RPG for Fallout Fans

It's no secret that the Fallout series has its roots in text adventures and tabletop games, where players choose how to act in dialogues and in-game situations. In fact, virtually every modern RPG grew out of those text adventures and tabletop games; as technology advanced, a visual layer was simply added on top of the role-playing system.

Let's try to imagine what Fallout would look like today as a text adventure: keep the quests and the role-playing system, but cut the 3D graphics, moving your character around the map and aiming in combat. Perhaps that's exactly how the developer of Memory Wastes framed the concept of the project — a text-based indie RPG with turn-based combat, which we decided to check out in a fit of nostalgia for surviving in harsh wastelands.

Memory Wastes is distributed under a free-to-play model: the base game is free but limited in features, while the full, unrestricted version has to be bought. This model is more typical of mobile games, and that's no accident: Memory Wastes was originally released on mobile platforms and only later ported to PC.

The game's mobile roots show as early as the main screen. It is split into three equal parts, sized precisely for a smartphone display. The left column is static — it shows the selected character's portrait and inventory; the middle column is the main one — this is where you talk to NPCs, fight and search for items; and the right column is optional — for trading and finding your way on the map.

The game's world has suffered a Catastrophe, as is so customary for post-apocalyptic games. The surviving members of humanity have split into factions living in the wastelands, while the roads and ruins are overrun by zombies, hostile robots, and mutated animals and plants.

The protagonist comes to in this world and discovers that they remember nothing and know nothing about it. They have to travel between settlements on the map, working as a courier and a hired killer, while collecting records for the archive that reveal the cause of the Catastrophe.

The core of Memory Wastes' gameplay is turn-based combat with a random chance of dealing and taking damage. The map shows the number of days needed to travel from point A to point B. Along the way, the player runs into enemies and objects to loot — abandoned trucks, ruined houses, the bodies of the dead. There are also mechanics for cracking safes and doors (which requires tools) and for hacking terminals in the form of a mini-game.

You have a chance to flee from any enemy, but as a rule you can't count on a successful escape. There are no dice rolls in the game: when you press the button, your attack either hits the enemy or doesn't, with an unknown probability. More powerful weapons, like an assault rifle, naturally hit harder, but nobody is safe from, say, three misses in a row. That's why you can die even in a fight with a vulture.

Death in the game is permanent. The player is thrown back to the main menu and has to start all over again. In this sense, the game resembles classic roguelites: enemies and loot on the routes are randomly generated, and you can keep part of the loot from previous runs. It's the permadeath mechanic that sets the game's difficulty: in the free version, the collected records about the world and the loot are lost after death (unlike the paid one), so getting to the end of the game becomes almost impossible — enemies love to pile on in "packs", several in a row, and medkits heal very poorly. The result: back to square one, try again.

What really lacks randomness, though, are the quests and conversations with NPCs. Each settlement has three characters to talk to: one trades, another tells you about the world and fills in the player's journal, and the third gives you the next quest.

Memory Wastes is a kind of excursion into the past of game development. Back to the days when text ran across the screen and the player's imagination filled in everything else — desert landscapes, terrifying monsters and majestic ruins. Memory Wastes can't compare with the Fallout games in depth of story and variety of choices, but fans of the "old school" may like it for its minimalism and simple mechanics. Half an hour of wasteland runs every evening — and you're ready to jump into the first two Fallout games.