The world is an endless desert, vast and lonely, but also a beautiful place to live if you've got the tools to get by. Yashi is a survivor with little more to his name than a coyote companion and a van, plus the know-how to keep his vehicle running, getting by from day to day with no particular purpose. One day, though, the van's radio catches a distant signal, not much but certainly a goal to work towards. Maybe there are other people out there, and while it's a slim hope it's not like wandering the desert in one direction is much different than wandering it in another, so Yashi might as well see what's waiting for him at the signal's origin.
Yashi: Sand Driver is a chill driving game set in a sunny desert wasteland, just you and your coyote heading out into the world to find your way across it in the hope of finding other people. A very early demo dropped for the game today, riding on the coattails of Steam's Survival Crafting Fest, and while it's noticeably rough due to the "very early" thing the style and personality it's loaded with make up the difference. The demo is a short little thing, about thirty minutes in total, with most of that spent tooling around the environment playing with the driving physics.
While primarily a driving game, Yashi starts out walking around and you need to take care of his thirst meter. He's got ten bottles of water and can refill them at the occasional oasis, and a good night's rest also tops it off through a solid application of videogame logic. Yashi also comes equipped with a sword, and while there are no creatures roaming around a couple of good slashes can be used to harvest scraps of metal from the wrecked cars found throughout the landscape.
Most of the demo, though, is spent in the van, heading towards chests marked with a sparkle that's visible clear across the map so long as there's a line of sight towards it. To get to the radio tower that's sending out pulses through the atmosphere (and good music, too) you need to clear a jump the van isn't fast enough to make, and to fix that you'll need more power. Four pieces of solar panel are waiting in chests scattered across the landscape, none of which are particularly hard to get so long as you don't overdo it on the gas. The truck will take damage if you abuse it, especially if you're not careful about driving off cliffs, but in the demo at least repairs are free and require little more than beating on the smoking part with a wrench.
As for the driving, it's fun and a little bouncy, with the terrain pushing the van out of a straight line on a regular basis. The landscape is videogame-smooth, without the rocky detailing of an offroader like Over the Hill, but you can still plow into terrain that's too steep to drive up, or even over a cliff or into the ocean if you're not careful. Damage isn't too big a deal, and the worst thing that happens if you flip the car is the day ending as you take the time to set it tire-side-down again, but the driving is about the fun of exploring through the desert with your coyote companion sticking its head out the passenger side window, rather than carefully picking your way over the landscape.
Even with doggy companion, though, it's hard to ignore that Yashi: Sand Driver is a little rough around the edges thanks to this being an early pre-alpha version. There's a lot of stuff shown in the trailer that's not even hinted at in the demo, and the news post on Steam announcing today's release is very clear that the developer would rather release something in proof-of-concept state just to have it out there, than tinker with it until perfection. Be aware that the thing the game wants to be isn't the thing it is quite yet and you'll have a good time, rattling around the dunes in a van and getting a pretty good sense of Yashi: Sand Driver's eventual form.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/a-little-desert-jaunt-in-yashi-sand-driver-demo/
