I just hopped on my motorcycle, listening to one of the several pleasantly disjointed pieces of classical music that plays on the radio, on my way to check off the tasks on the list in the upper right corner of the screen by exploring an abandoned hospital. It’s a great hospital, by the way. A head-on-a-headlight fantasy wanders the corridors reminiscent of The Division 2 or The Last Of Us natural.
Striking, but also within reach of comparison. And if Once Human was simply a collection of xz ys, as it seems, then I’m not sure I’d have much positive to say about it. At first glance, what you get here is a third-person shooter from a decade ago that happily throws pins along any straight path to progress with live-service obfuscation, underpinned by a disconnected crafting and construction economy that has you putting mined rocks and chopped wood in the oven and pulling out freshly baked shotguns a few minutes later. Its systems run the gamut from tedious pleasure to being a source of stern psychological damage, and even the basic act of trading in your initial rustic Tier I baseball cap means navigating a bunch of menus, currencies, and resources.
But, look. I’m driving back from the hospital when I notice a diminutive robot furiously pounding the road with a pickaxe so brisk that its angular head vibrates, and so brisk that I can’t tell if it’s a bug or not. I hop off my bike and interact with it. My character pats the robot on the head, and then it disappears. I’ll find out what this robot is up to a few hours later, and while it kills the mystery for me, this first encounter serves to prime my tired eyes for additional weirdness and creativity, and I can’t assist but like Once Human , even if I never plan on playing it again.
I kill my first solo boss, but before that there’s a party gathering menu where you can drag in momentary allies, like in Destiny’s Attack. The boss himself is a giant idiot, a hunk of tissue and metal. He angrily fires at me with a Gatling gun strapped to his body, and when he stops to reload I come out of cover, fire a few shots, and repeat until I win. As a reward I get a yellow goo with bulging eyes, which I take back to my base and place in a diminutive room, where I can deploy it during fights as a immense, slippery barricade behind which I can hide, still bulging eyes. Traveling after the boss I come across a giant six-legged bus that shimmers with phantasmagoric delicate. I go inside, and my yellow gel friend and I admire the view as it wanders around the map.
I… God, I’m so sorry. I… I think you should play this game?
This is not Good. I need to explain this. But it has a strange kind of soul, and even a little sinew, even if both are shrouded in a constant distrust that the player will appreciate them if they are not handed out as a reward for feverishly studying its moth-eaten piles of property like a tormented librarian.
Don’t play if you have literally anything else on you. The first few hours are a certified saga of shit. After falling out of the sky on a talking purple bird, it takes me twenty minutes to find a spot to set up my base that isn’t already occupied by another player, after which I’m bombarded with menus that are clearly designed to sabotage my willpower into a submissive fugue of sunk costs. Open the functions wheel, then select the Cradle to go to the Memetic screen. Open the Memetic screens and unlock the disassembly table under the Gathering type. Open my skull with a immense can opener.

Getting my first weapon involves a crafting process that is annoying enough to inspire eco-saboteurs. A furnace. Charcoal. Ingots. A dismantling bench. Scrap. I need more scrap. I get a map marker, then sprint for three full minutes to get there. I open a few crates. I shoot one (1) zombie. I teleport back to my territory. I start climbing the crafting tree to build a shotgun. At one point I have to craft about 30 pieces of charcoal from wood. This takes 30 seconds. I wait. Then a copper ingot. This takes two minutes. I think I’d be better off clicking on some rocks.
But you like clicking rocks, says Once Human, or you wouldn’t be here. I’ve known I used to like a pickaxe, sure. But only really when those things work to inject danger and texture into both the fictional destinations and your place in their ecosystem. But there’s something distinctly screwed up here about survival and creation. There’s no joy in exerting the necessary resourcefulness in a arduous environment, in mastering an ecosystem like, say, the Green Hell. There’s also no final tying of the knot, no reversion of the demands of survival to the ritual of crawling back home bruised and dried after a arduous outing, and how that fits into the rhythms and routines of existence in a modern world. The landscape feels like a lobby, even if the UX doesn’t seem actively hostile to the idea that you might accidentally forget that you’re engaging with a product first and the world second.
And yet…
Players can leave each other little message donuts. Early on, I find one that says, “Welcome to the unknown. We love this place.” It takes me a while to get through, because honestly, there’s very little that’s unknown in the repetitiveness of the landscape surrounding my little patch of territory—lakes, trees, rocks, and hills. But I keep playing and exploring the world, which is peppered with level suggestions, mini-dungeons, and cordial outposts. Eventually, I start to notice things. Painted murals of cartoon bears in ruined bedrooms. Scurrying purple oddities wearing tarps against hazards like kids dressed as Halloween ghosts. Haunted refrigerators. Corpses anchored to the ground by something like amber yellow.

I’m starting to learn what my favorite things to do are. Trotting deer on neighbors’ lands with a submachine gun. Slashing zombies with my arm with one of the few truly satisfying hand-to-hand combat animations that elevate otherwise weightless combat. Riding my bike in search of modern strange creatures. One of them being a scarecrow. A scarecrow! I’m sure the more I learn about how this game actually works, the less intrigued I’ll be, but I’m grateful, but also a little gloomy. There’s real art behind that cage.
Sometimes games are about finding your own elated place in their many systems. My other favorite activity in Once Human is the one where you press each of the WASD keys in rapid succession to make your character move in perfect circles. I often did this while waiting for items to craft. I highly recommend it, but while Once Human is free, it’s a 50GB download, and I suspect you may already have something in your library that lets you do this.
I sincerely hope that the creature designers and whoever was responsible for the denser environmental locations get to work on a project that is confident enough to charge up front so that everything good about their work doesn’t have to be piecemealed to support such a numb and complicated live service. Likewise, the crafting and building system, which feels so disconnected from everything else that I can’t see it as anything more than trend chasing.
It all ends as if someone had put a cult classic console gem through a shredder and filled the spaces between the strips with silica gel, crackers, and self-assessment forms. But its saving grace is that it doesn’t seem cynical, but rather clingy, almost as if trapped under a pile of norms and necessities for its existence. You might want to stick around long enough to find the places where it pokes its curious head out from under the rubble. The little robot was for mining ore, by the way, so it might assist.