Help Will Come Tomorrow Review

Help Will Come Tomorrow is a strategy-survival game set in 1917 pre-Bolshevik Imperial Russia. Civil War and Revolution are tearing the country apart and the people are scared. Will help ever come?

The story begins with a train being attacked and derailed, forcing four people from different backgrounds to come together and survive in the Siberian Wilderness – any other found survivors are being shot and killed. Those four survivors are randomly selected from a selection of characters, making each playthrough a new experience. From this point on, these four survivors must work together to build and maintain a camp in order to survive not only the attackers of the train but the many of forces at play; the harsh Winter weather, wild animals, hunger, exhaustion, sickness – they all play a part here.

Help Will Come Tomorrow comes with a rather hefty tutorial in which the amount of information given can feel pretty overwhelming at first , but when you actually start to play the game the mechanics will start to feel pretty natural. That’s despite a lot of things which need to be kept an eye on.

Each character has their own personality, traits, and vitals. It’s essential that you pay attention to these things in order to get the best out of your playthrough. Some characters will be better at different things, some characters will get on with other characters more so than others and therefore will work better with those characters. You must maintain each characters hunger levels, exhaustion levels, thirst, warmth, and even their well-being. It’s incredibly difficult to keep these maintained, but nobody said survival was easy.

There are many things you can do in order to keep the survivors happy and safe and it all comes down to your camp. First things first, clearing the snow will allow you to build simple, yet effective structures. A fire to keep the survivors warm and to also cook food, a shelter for them to rest, a workshop to enable them to build tools and weapons, a quarantine post to help the sick, and a Palisades to shield from the wind and keep outsiders out. Of course, all of these things can be expanded on and upgraded in order to provide more but you will need the right equipment and supplies in order to do so.

This is where Exhibitions come into play. You are able to send the survivors outside of the camp in order to scavenge for supplies and to explore the surrounding area. You are able to send one or two survivors out to explore, but obviously, this doesn’t come without its risks. Send a survivor out alone and they could get lost or your survivors could get attacked whilst out. It’s important you look at the details surrounding a particular area and equip the survivors with the relevant equipment. Be careful though, the survivors only have a certain amount of action points per day, so prioritise what they need. 

The best part of Help Will Come Tomorrow is the characters themselves – each night you are able to choose three subjects to talk about and this will slowly uncover each character’s backstory and why they are who they are. It’s really interesting and somewhat heartfelt, allowing you to become more attached to certain characters because of the things they have experienced and been through.