The Egypt Trail

I snagged Predynastic Egypt and its sequel Egypt: Old Kingdom during some sale or another. In terms of mechanics, they're fundamentally managerial: assign workers to various resource-producing tiles, advance through a tech tree and leverage your production toward major projects. In practice, however...

 

... their admitted potential's muddied in an unsatisfying mix of whack-a-mole and rote memorization.

As their major selling point, they try to stick to the general timeline of events in Ancient Egypt, and thus like most "educational" titles fall into the common trap of ignoring the importance of mammalian play (the experimental, interactive, malleable patterns within a specific ruleset) for the didactic condescension of putting a student through fixed paces. A comparison might be made to that famous old success story of educational games, the Trail series.

The Oregon Trail was nearly ubiquitous on classroom computers back in the '90s, used by teachers as a carrot to reward good behavior and surprisingly appreciated by students (even as its primitive pixelation got out-graphicked by Mortal Kombat and Doom) for its sweeping sense of adventure somewhat lacking in the 8-16bit eras. We learned that wagon axles can break and there's such a place as Oregon (shut up Portland) because this knowledge fed into the greater goal of making a successful journey.

Of its sequels, The Yukon Trail put you through a somewhat slow introduction and over-played its fancier graphics at times, but nevertheless benefited from an over-arching goal (gold! yeee-haw!) achievable by juggling various choices. The Amazon Trail, on the other hand hinged on a nonsensical time travel plot with a magic talking jaguar meant to sell Captain Planet levels of moralistic grandstanding. Its wildlife and fishing minigames eclipsed any coherent point to your journey, and the whole thing made about as much sense as an Oregon Trail consisting of hunting squirrels while Ratatosk sends you to meet Erik the Red.

The Egypt games both pelt you with random events and nail you to a specific historic timeline. In the screenshot above, lions suddenly appeared on one of my tiles, in the middle of an otherwise wholly domesticated Memphis, requiring me to re-assign a worker to exterminate them. While this sort of event can certainly spice up a strategy game (see Alpha Centauri's fungal blooms) if either rare or scaling to playing style (if I'd deliberately chosen to anger Bastet I'd understand) they should always be balanced against the constructive angle. A base of operations, by and large, is supposed to function as established by the player from that point forward, but here randomized events constantly force you to revisit tile by tile to put out fires, exterminate lions, rebuild houses, etc.

 

In Predynastic an eclipse event even gives you a -99% production in all resources for a turn, which makes every bit as little sense here as stuns did in UnderRail. "Skip a turn" cards have their place in group / multiplayer games where they change the dynamic between players or characters, but in a single-player game they merely amount to randomly penalizing the player without justification, to the point where in a playthrough with two missed turns, I lost by exactly one turn's worth of food production. Then I uninstalled. It's Oregon Trail's most mocked feature "family member XYZ has died of dysentery" rehashed on a strategy map.

Paradoxically, both campaigns are both unduly ranzomized and unduly restrictive. To adhere to historical events, you'll always be playing on the same map of Egypt / Hierakonpolis / Memphis (giving the feel you paid $5 for a custom map) minimally randomized in tile production, with major events (like conflicts between Upper / Lower kingdoms) occuring at the same fixed turn. Dramatic as it may sound, this merely amounts to repeating the same scenario a dozen times to memorize exactly when you'll need extra food or production or soldiers, or which events are worth attempting and which (like the Saharan exodus in Predynastic) are better failed intentionally. Also, while technically you do have access to a tech tree, individual techs customarily give +0.3% (actual figure from Old Kingdom) bonuses, piling onto each other sequentially with no incentive to dive down any branch more than one or two steps ahead. Instead, much like fishing the Amazon and losing track of the trail, most of your playthrough gets bogged down in shuffling new workers repeatedly to the same exact tile every time they get washed away by a flood or eaten by lions.

Or, worse, watching your number of soldiers graaaaaadually fluctuating in randomized battles.

Games like Civilization or Stellaris prove so infinitely replayable because their randomization opens new opportunities for a player otherwise free to follow a personal style. The Egypt campagins instead give you the worst of both worlds, dictating your priorities while randomizing your success. Not terrible for their price, but do yourself a favor and look up the scripted events beforehand on some online cheat-sheet.