This is an Early Access Review and as such opinions are based solely on the state of the game at the time of review and subject to change as development progresses leading up to final release.
Summer camp evokes thoughts of summer love, mosquito bites, and constantly being drenched in sweat. Camp Canyonwood from Deli Interactive LLC hopes to capture the magic that drives people to camp each summer, minus the sweat. In this Early Access build of the game, Deli has delivered a good set of bones and promises to keep adding new bells and whistles throughout the coming year.
You play as a new camp counselor, heading into their first year with Camp Canyonwood. Just like any part time summer job, the boss is awful, the workplace is filled with death hazards, and you’re taking on more responsibilities than what you’re being paid to do. This camp has seen better days, a sentiment signified by its overall one-star rating. As the new blood, it is your job to show the campers a good time while also turning around the camp’s reputation. Each seven days a new set of campers arrives. Your job is to discover what they like and help them earn badges by doing different activities such as woodcutting, fishing, and stargazing. The more badges you give out, the more money you earn, which in turn can be used to spruce up the grounds with new buildings and decorations.
The cycle of creating happy campers (sorry), which in turn creates a better camp for the next set of campers is fascinating. It gives a depth to the relationships built across the summer, whereas in something adjacent like Animal Crossing, your focus would be on improving your situation while building relationships around it. Current relationships with other camp workers/counselors is limited to buying materials and completing fetch quests, the latter of which unlocks more items and materials for you to buy. I do hope for an expansion of the roles for these other workers in the game’s future.
Your first summer camp starts with four campers, but this number can grow into double digits as you slowly start to bring the camp’s rating up. Early on it was tough to keep up with campers. Deli Interactive’s cartoon style and bird characters add to the whimsical feeling of camp, but differentiating some campers at times was tough, especially in moments when they were bunched up. The game does contain a notepad for you to keep notes on things to do. There’s also a menu with your campers listed out and their current stats, but I found myself having to enter this menu numerous times to differentiate them and tell who was losing energy or not feeling safe. There are in game indicators that flash at the top of the screen and allow you to zoom in on the camper. This was useful for campers who had wandered off or were doing a task, but again when bunched up, I found it to not work as well. That said, talking to the campers and finding out their likes and dislikes added to the experience and made me feel like I was getting to know my campers. The constant fighting and bullying between campers also made the world feel more alive than it already was.
Camp Canyonwood is at its best when the unexpected happens. There’s nothing like walking through the woods with your campers when a fight breaks out between two of them. You go to break it up when you notice a wild bear approaching you and the kids. You all hightail it back to camp, running past a cobra and kicking a hornet’s nest on the way. Other strange happenings include some creepy bird ghosts, aliens abducting campers, and a strange deer/wendigo demon visiting you at night, offering gifts. There also seems to be a mystery afoot on the grounds, surrounding the counselor who previously held your position. It’s believed he abandoned the camp, but any hiker worth their salt will discover that was not the case within the first hour of playing the game. With additional events and phenomena planned in future updates, it will be fun to see where this mystery goes and what other unexpected adventures players will get into.
Playing on mouse and keyboard did leave me wanting to jump over to a controller. There is no current controller support, but it is on the way. Interaction with items is keyed to holding ‘E’ (sometimes ‘F’), while making a camper interact with something is keyed to just pressing ‘E’. This could get annoying when working in a big group. Thankfully the game does default commands to campers with the proper tools to do the task being asked of them. Another annoyance was having to talk to each camper to give them a fishing rod or an axe, instead of just being able to mouse it over to them. Again, this could all be fixed later, but this feels like an essential quality of life thing that would make the game more friendly to mouse and keyboard players.
There is a good set of bones here for Deli Interactive to build from. Anyone with hours of experience in the likes of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley may find some features lacking, but looking at the recently released roadmap, Camp Canyonwood looks like a sim that could keep players coming back, summer after summer.
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