Tutorial area
The game opens with very little fanfare. There’s no menu the first time you boot the game up - just a blank, white screen with some text saying something like “press space to start”. When you do, a cartoon falling noise starts playing. Suddenly, a giant shape comes into view, previously obscured by a thick, white fog. You realize this is a first-person cutscene and that you’re falling out of the sky.
The player lands on a soft cushion of moss with a THUD, somehow unharmed. You stand up and the game sets you loose from there. You navigate a bare bones tutorial that can be skipped if you so choose. You exit the mossy, overgrown starting room and are greeted with a tall cliffside view of a shoreline. You’re up too high to jump down and need to proceed along the cliff face.
You greet a few castaways along the path who direct you towards the beach.
Muscle Beach
You gradually encounter more and more castaways living on their own as you make your way down the coast towards the beach, where a larger human civilization has formed. It’s still small - probably about a dozen people at most - but some semblance of a little town has been thrown together from metal scraps and shipwrecks.
The castaways here are on the brink of starvation and aren’t really having a great time out here. They urge you to find a way inland since you’re the only one of them in good shape. One of them directs you to a spire nearby with a shipwreck containing tools you might be able to make use of.
This is the first place you hear people speak of The Captain, where they describe this mysterious behemoth of a man who scaled the wall using a grapple hook. They say there might be something similar on the ship you can use (they’re too malnourished to make the climb themselves)
The ship at the top of the spire mound has a lot of valuable things the castaways below could make use of. There’s a big cannon (not currently operational), clothing, weapons - and the skeletons of the dead crew that came before.
This is also where you obtain your grapple hook. It’s barely functional / damaged but it suits your purposes nicely (the Captain has a more advanced model that places points)
You eventually return to this place later, at which point the castaways are doing much better and have restored the cannon on top of the ship
Potentially give the player the choice to throw a ladder down that lets the guys get up - should be hard to miss + game should remind player but you’re still free to not do it, if you don’t the next time you come back thru the mossy tunnel they’ve all starved to death (cannon can still be made operational)