Meadow is a MMO
Walking Simulator game released on
Steam in 2016 by the Swedish company Might and Delight as a part of their
Shelter franchise. It was dubbed by the developer as a "forum in game's clothing" where you play as a forest animal, explore the world and interact with other players using simple emotes, symbols, actions and sounds, in order to unlock new playable animals, skins or emotes and generally have a good time. Unlike the other
Shelter installments,
Meadow does not feature any survival elements or enemies, going instead for a relaxing atmosphere of exploration and friendliness. The developers interact actively with the fanbase, and the game gets regular updates.
This game provides examples of:
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Pink, blue and gold puzzle pieces let you unlock (respectively) new emotes, new coats/voices, and new animals.
- Crystal Landscape: One of the caves is made of this.
- Cute, but Cacophonic: A bunch of excitable badger cubs may occasionally turn into this.
- Cute Kitten: The lynx cubs, with their adorable emotes and high-pitched voices.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The only way to "die" is to fall off the world's edge... and then you wake up on the last cached position after what seems to have been a "faceplant".
- A Dog Named "Dog": Default setting for all animal avatars. You can name your animal whatever you want, but only you will ever see the name in-game.
- Edible Collectible: Fruit trees and shrubs are scattered across the world, and their larger-than-life gifts can be consumed by everyone.
- Falling Damage: Averted as such, but you "faceplant" if you fall long enough and have to wait a few seconds to be able to move around again.
- Flat World: The entire place is an irregular(ish)-shaped chunk of land, water running off the edges and everything, suspended inside a cylindrical skybox. Nobody knows why.
- Fungus Humongous: Some of the collectible mushrooms are as big as a wolf. The shelf mushroom platforms on the central tree are also big enough to support three or four animals.
- Ghibli Hills
- High on Catnip: There's an achievement for that.
- Informed Species: The supposed goat looks (and sounds) less like a goat and more like a deer with chamois horns stuck on it.
- Interspecies Friendship: A necessity for getting collectibles from obelisks, which require more than one animal to break them.
- Lighter and Softer: than other Shelter games
- Noisy Nature
- Only one of the fox voices (#3) actually sounds like a fox yelping. The other two sound more like dogs: #1 whimpers, #2 snorts.
- The eagle screech, although loud and refreshingly non-red-tailed-hawky, sounds nothing like the bald eagle.
- Patchwork Map: There are obvious seams between green, winter and fall areas.
- Signature Roar: With a bit of practice you can tell from a vague distant sound not only the animal, but the stage of customization progress it is on. The piercing "tweet tweet!" of the eagles is especially attention-grabbing.
- Skybox: The skybox is cylindrical, which fits the Flat World architecture of the game world.
- Sliding Scale of Collectible Tracking: The Individual Identification kind. Each type of flower (or mushroom) is unique, makes a different sound upon collection (depending on its rarity), and all the plants you collect are added to your menu screen.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: Even pheasants can swim here!
- Woodland Creatures: The game world's population consists of badgers, lynxes, frogs, foxes, bear cubs, rabbits, hedgehogs and wolves, plus slightly more exotic pheasants and eagles, and chamois goats instead of the traditional deer (or so the game says).
- World Tree: The immense tree in the center of the world serves as the players' main spawn point, meeting place and landmark.
