NUTS is a pretty straightforward game. You’re in a surreal green, yellow, and orange world, tracking squirrels who leave a tree at night and move towards a watering hole.
That’s an easy concept, but if you’re like me, you have never tracked an animal before. This is a painstakingly slow task; set up your three cameras, go back to your cabin, go to sleep, wake up, analyse the footage, move the cameras, adjust the angle, go back to your cabin, sleep. This is basically what you’re doing throughout the game.
There are other objects in your cabin like cans of food, some light cooking supplies, random note papers, and a fax machine/printer. You have a phone that your boss uses to tell you about your mission. This mission is odd: just watch squirrels. There is always this looming feeling that something else is going to happen – something else is going to take over and spin the game in a new direction.
In my small time with NUTS, at EGX 2019, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something more was going to happen. I kept setting up my cameras, watching the squirrel, and wondering at what point I’d figure out where it went. Watching the footage back on TV screens the next morning was simple enough, though I did struggle with putting out cameras often.
You do have a little mini-map which shows the paths you’ve walked and the angle you’re facing, as well as where the squirrel is coming out from. This helps a lot when it comes to placing the cameras, but maybe it would have made more sense to place the three further apart then I did. Despite having some camera issues of my own, I started to really enjoy NUTS. The task started to become fun, even if I couldn’t shake the feeling that something else might be going on.
NUTS is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can follow its creation on the game’s site.