It was a little over a year ago that I got to play I Am Future’s demo. While I’ve messed around with it for an hour or two since then, I never made it very far, wanting to revel in what its full release would have to offer. Now, it’s finally here.
I Am Future is a cozy post-apocalyptic management game, developed by Mandragora and published by tinyBuild. You play as an unnamed (in the beginning) man or woman who, thanks to a hungry little seagull, has finally woken up from a six-and-a-half-year hibernation. Finding yourself on an abandoned rooftop with an endless amount of junk, old machines waiting to be broken down, and inaccessible areas, you need to figure out who you are, where you are, and how you got there.
In I Am Future, you can’t customize your character before the story starts, but you’re able to as soon as you take control. Eventually, through completing certain tasks, purchasing from certain stores, or finding and decoding certain gift boxes, you can unlock some cosmetics to spruce them up with. That being said, I didn’t spend too much time customizing myself and focused on learning the mechanics.
The rooftop you’ve awakened on is in need of a serious fixer-upper, and it’s up to you to clear the debris and get things looking pretty and habitable. To do that, though, you need to find your tools. There are a few starter tools scattered around the rooftop that you’re able to connect to your robotic arm. There’s the cybernetic hand, the saw, the drill, the injector, and the hammer, which can all be upgraded multiple times. To use them, you walk up to an item that can be broken down, and follow instructions using your arrow keys (for example, holding them down for a set amount of time) to dismantle them. It’s simple enough, but it gets somewhat tedious, like a lot of the mechanics in this game.
Your first few tasks in I Am Future will get you introduced to the game’s basic mechanics. You have a health and hunger bar, and an empty hunger bar will eventually lower your health, but there are plenty of resources on land to snack on while you get yourself settled into gardening, fishing, and cooking. Once you do start fishing, it’s unbearably boring. You click when you get a catch, and then click three more times when the option (slowly) shows up. As I mentioned, you can have a garden as well, and this is where the game’s only enemies come into play.
At night time, little leeches called Electrosites will spawn and go after your crops or the food that spawns naturally on the ground. After they eat your food, or once daytime comes, they burrow into the ground and blossom as toxic plants. They don’t hurt you (unless you try to pull the weeds without using the spray) but they spread fast and they’re quite annoying to deal with.
Thankfully, there are coziness levels now, so if you don’t want those leeches eating up your plants at night, you can use cozy mode. If you don’t want to lose health when your satiety goes to zero, you can turn on domestic mode. These can be toggled on and off whenever you please, and they now affect how slowly your hunger bar goes down.
The biggest aspect of I Am Future is breaking resources down to build machines and making different resources in said machines. While this started off fun, it eventually became a drag with how much progress is blocked behind upgrading everything you build, and often more than once. One of the main things you need to upgrade is the rooftop’s smart tower, where you can send a little drone on expeditions. There are shops for you to buy things (using farmed bitcoins as currency which is an interesting choice), abandoned buildings for you to collect resources from, and more areas for you to unlock. Here you can also unlock helpful upgrades, such as linking together storage boxes or new types of minions that will do different tasks for you.
Another interesting mechanic that’s tied into the storyline is the friends you collect. Earl the Fridge, Mariquinn the Jukebox, and Prospero Fortune Teller, to name a few. As the story progresses, you learn more about them and yourself, and you’re eventually able to slowly but surely build your relationship with them by giving them gifts and playing mini-games with them.
After finishing the demo for I Am Future, I remember being excited about the storyline. We were left off on a cliffhanger, and now that I’ve found out what comes next, it’s…okay. It’s nothing bad, but it’s not world-changing either. It’s a simple storyline that, while a little dramatic at times, allows you to continue through the game without a sense of urgency. Depending on who you are, that could be a great thing or a dealbreaker
With over 20 hours sunk into I Am Future, there is so much left for me to do. You cannot progress the main storyline, as simple as it is, without upgrading your machines first, and this takes a while to do. I believe that whether you’ll enjoy this game largely depends on how much you care about not having an in-depth story, and spending all of your time trying to upgrade machines.
I really enjoyed I Am Future for a majority of my hours, but I eventually hit a point where I think I’ve made progress and it’s immediately blocked by having to do more upgrades. I went from not being able to put the game down to, unfortunately, dreading having to pick it back up. I Am Future has the potential to be a great game, and I can see myself coming back to it after taking a break. But with the endless upgrades and extremely slow progress, plus repetitive tasks and minigames, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped I would.
Inanna played I Am Future on PC with a review code.
