Strandbeest clearly captured the imaginations of the developers of Last Oasis, who have placed them front and centre of their unique open world adventure. You can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to get run over by one, all of its scuttling wooden feet trampling on your naked torso. They appear strangely organic, like vehicles from some other dimension where wheels were never discovered, and against the backdrop of the windswept and metal-grey beaches of the North Sea they appear utterly alien. Wing-like mechanisms capture the kinetic energy of the sea breeze and transfer it via some inscrutable machinations into the motion of a set of bug-like legs and undulating worm bodies. Whether alive or not Jansen’s invention is totally entrancing. They exist in the space between art and engineering, says the artist, and are neither living nor dead, though if we’re being pragmatic, they’re exactly as alive as a bag of broom handles rolling down a hillside. What is a strandbeest? They’re the real-world creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen: various multi-legged, wind-powered kinetic structures that resemble K’nex figures and skitter across beaches like scorpions made of chopsticks. Last Oasis is the most recent culprit, a multiplayer craft ‘em up set on the narrow habitable strip of a tidally locked Earth, between the half that’s being baked and the half that’s being frozen, in which you ride around on strandbeests in search of water, food and the various bits of garbage required to keep you alive. When the world eventually does stop turning, I fear that this generation, spoon-fed by games that promised delightful escapism to survivalist playgrounds, will in fact be ill-equipped for the harsh reality of repeatedly punching cactuses until their pockets fill up with cactus flesh. Sometimes I worry that open world survival sims are romanticising the very real challenges involved in carving out a nomadic existence on a planet that’s stopped rotating by constructing elaborate wooden spider-cars and captaining them across vast deserts, forming clans and trading limited resources to take control of the world’s remaining oases. This week, he's exploring the intersection of art and engineering by driving a big wooden spider-car in survivalist MMO Last Oasis. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.
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