Stealth in video games is a tricky mechanic to nail down. If it’s too gamified, it can feel ridiculously unrealistic and overpowered; if it’s too realistic, it can feel too challenging and unfun to tackle. Despite how hard developing a good stealth system has proven to be, it is still a popular genre with many AAA and indie developers throwing their hat in the ring to capture players’ attention.
Steel Seed, developed by Storm in a Teacup and published by ESDigital Games, is a stealth-action adventure with 3D platforming set in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic world. The game has some interesting ideas in its writing, world design, and gameplay systems, but like any other game, especially stealth games, finding that sweet spot is a challenge that not every title can achieve.
Steel Seed opens with the protagonist, Zoe, strapped down to a bed in a large industrial-looking lab as a man is reassuringly talking to us. We later learn this was our father, using cybernetic technology to put us in a stasis to wait out Earth’s environmental apocalypse and wake up someday to save humanity once again.
As we wake up centuries later, we are guided by a flying drone, Koby, that communicates with us in a binary R2D2-type language that Zoe understands thanks to her cybernetic upgrades. As we explore the ruins of the Arrow Industries, where our father worked to use technology and AI to help prevent humanity’s destruction, we see no other living beings, but instead are targeted and attacked by hostile robots and giant machines. As we escape and go deeper in the facilities, we find S4VI, a hologram projection programmed by our father to help us find him once we wake up. He has split his consciousness into four shards and has scattered them in secure places in the facility, and we have to go find them. We also learn that the hostile robots are those who are corrupted by the data and knowledge of humanity, and now view them as a threat to the world that must be neutralized at all costs.
While the story of Steel Seed has interesting inspirations and tackles issues that I and clearly the developers are very passionate about, the writing feels average at best. It’s very much “tell, not show” with long monologue lore dumps from S4VI where I just zoned out, or long walks or rides on the jet ski, where nothing happens but a one-way dialogue between Zoe and Koby as we are forced to hold one finger on the move forward button and try to pay attention to Zoe’s backstory for minutes. It’s more so disappointing as the game excels at creating epic and awe-inspiring backdrops, but doesn’t manage to use these scenes to show a more subtle but meaningful version of the story. The voice acting and sound design are also quite nice and that helps the narrative of the game. Zoe and Koby have a lot of banter, and even though the dialogue can be cheesy at times, the delivery is charming enough to make us like the characters.
The environmental design and art style are some of the best features in Steel Seed. Despite the environmental design’s shortcomings in storytelling, the scale of the structures and grand scenery conveys a sense of humility that fits the narrative theme. The character designs and environment both look nice and serve their purpose to enhance the gameplay experience. The game is not necessarily an open world, even though it can look like it, but the design helps narrow down the paths of exploration. The main complaint I had about the art of the game was that the atmosphere can get repetitive and feel stagnant, but that’s more a failure of pacing and gameplay than the world design itself.
Steel Seed’s gameplay can be split into three parts: exploration, stealth, and combat. Exploration, though not perfect, was my favorite aspect of gameplay. The 3D platforming, challenges, and puzzles created an enjoyable and satisfying experience. Some platforming sections were pretty long, and failing midway meant we had to restart from the beginning. This was a reasonable challenge, but this became a theme throughout my experience with Steel Seed that eventually felt quite frustrating.
Stealth sections of the game start pretty simple. We can use Koby to scout and mark enemies, plan our path, and start taking out enemies one by one. We can perform stealth kills from behind enemies, glitch fields that make us invisible, from behind covers, or from ledges. As we progress, we can unlock special ammo for Koby and use the environment to give us more options when facing a large group of enemies. The problem comes when I realized there is no manual saving in Steel Seed. If I fail and die during a stealth section, no matter how far along I was, I had to start from the beginning. There were areas with more than two dozen enemies of different varieties. Marking the enemies alone could take a couple of minutes, then I had to go through them carefully, one by one, maybe screw up a little a fight a couple of them in the open, but in the end, one mistake, and I had to do it all over again.
The combat itself is also very unforgiving. Most of the time, two or three hits from the enemies are enough to kill us. We have limited resources to heal and use abilities while fighting, and if we are facing more than one enemy, survival gets very hard. We can unlock new abilities and passives that help us in combat or stealth, but each new talent is locked behind a challenge. The problem is that the challenge required to unlock a new talent is often related to the ability that it offers. I got pretty good at stealth in the game, so I could finish the challenges and get new abilities that help the stealth missions even further. But I was not good at the game’s combat, which means it was even harder for me to unlock talents that would help me where I needed them the most.
The combination of all of these systems meant that my experience playing Steel Seed was mostly restarting from a checkpoint over and over again, until I finally had a clean run, got to the next section, and rinse and repeat. The satisfaction of completing a challenging section was just not rewarding enough to keep me going. Nothing about any of these systems or any aspect of the game is bad on its own, but there are small frustrations that eventually added up to the point that I could not get myself to continue playing. I got two of the four shards, so I assume I’m about halfway done with the game, but without some refinements and balances or the option to manually save when we are not in combat, I can’t imagine going back to it.
Steel Seed‘s main problem in every aspect of the game is pacing. From story and dialogue to gameplay and mechanics, everything feels unnecessarily slow, repetitive, and grindy. And when we eventually overcome a challenge, all we are rewarded with is a harder challenge with no sense of real progression. I do appreciate the features that the game does well, like the art, design, and music, and I can see the passion that the writers have for the topic and the story they tried to tell, but the end result does not utilize these potentials.
Nima played Steel Seed on PC with a provided review copy.
