In the realm of educational games, none can really stand against The Oregon Trail when it comes to fame. It's an instantly recognizable series that has maintained a presence in pop culture for over 50 years now. For some it's a nostalgic childhood game. The highlight of their history classes. For others, it's a meme where you can name characters after your friends and watch them die of dysentery.
In The Oregon Trail you assume the identity of a mid-19th century wagon leader, charged with bringing a band of pioneers from Missouri to Oregon. A trek of over 2000 miles through harsh, unsettled lands, where your party will face disease, supply shortages, thievery, and potentially even death. Yours wouldn't be the first corpses to litter the trail.
Your journey starts in the town of Independence. Here you have an opportunity to buy initial supplies for your journey. Food to eat, oxen to pull the wagon, spare parts to repair said wagon, clothes to keep people warm, and bullets to fuel your raging, American spirit. Asking for advice on how much you'll need is wise, because second chances are rare on the trail. Few of your stops will have stores like the one in Independence and you may not even reach those if you left the town with too few supplies. You may be able to trade with other pioneers, but this is unreliable and their offers are rarely fair. It's as if they can smell your desperation.
How much money you have depends on your chosen background. The rich banker starts with so much money you might not even know what to do with it, while the other backgrounds will have far less resources available to them. To "balance" this, being a lowly laborer increases the multiplier on your score. So while the banker is more likely to reach Oregon, they're unlikely to break the leaderboard in doing so. It's fine and I can see its use in a classroom setting, but it would have been nice if there were more perks. Like maybe the carpenter could have better odds of repairing the wagon.
Once you're off on your journey, The Oregon Trail does slow down as far as gameplay is concerned. You're just watching your little carriage roll down the road for the most part, without any input on your part. Sometimes there's an alert like someone getting sick or finding abandoned supplies, which you can only dismiss and keep going.
Your only real option between landmarks is to press enter. This opens up the main menu from where you can alter the pace of your carriage and ration food. You can also check supplies or choose to go hunting, which sees you shooting animals to restock on food. This is also where you can check for other travelers to trade with, by the way. It's not much in terms of interactivity though and that's really the game's biggest shortcoming.
Yeah, it's silly fun when your best friend gets bitten by a snake, but that doesn't translate to any choice you can make as wagon leader. It's just something that happens and, probably, affects the overall health of the party in some nebulous way. When someone gets sick, you can't choose a treatment for them because treatment doesn't exist. There's no medicine or alternative choices there. You just randomly get sick and hope you randomly get better. Everything could be perfectly alright and suddenly Stian gets typhoid and dies the next day.
That does fit the overall message that the game is trying to get across and, yea, it is pretty damn funny when it happens. The real-life Oregon Trail was daunting. Many people did just die because they randomly got sick or their supplies got stolen or some other misfortune entirely out of their control befell them. Still, it would have been nice if the game presented you some choice you can make or had a few more resources to manage that would give you a degree of influence. Because as it stands, much of The Oregon Trail is just watching your cart go and hoping for the best.
With that said, I found the game to be surprisingly easy. I made it all the way to the end on my first attempt without too much effort. Then beat the game on every subsequent attempt also. These runs were also fairly short and the novelty wore off quickly when I replayed it. Each run feeling more or less the same as the last one. So if you're going to play the game yourself, don't set aside too much time for it. You'll likely be done in less than an hour.
There are a few instances where you can play mini-games. Most prominently the hunting one, though there's a few others you can try as well. When hunting, you are presented with a screen full of randomized terrain you can walk around in. Animals will pop in from random corners whereupon you can try to shoot them. You have about a minute to score some kills, which then translates into an amount of food you get to take back to the wagon. Though if you go overboard, you'll be leaving entire bisons worth of meat behind as it's too heavy to carry back.
It's a simple mini-game and one you can replay so long as you have bullets. Hey, it beats paying attention in class.
As for the game's educational value, The Oregon Trail is a touch controversial. Most of the value lies in the gameplay; in actually traversing this trail and enduring its hardships. More depth would have been appreciated there, but it's a fine way to teach kids (and myself) history. Like you don't truly appreciate how arduous this journey was for the pioneers until you watch entire months pass as you inch your way across the map. The frustration of dealing with random setbacks you have no control over. Interspersed with the occasional hunting trip and decision moments.
You can talk with people at a select few stops, who will share tips or just have some dialogue reflective of what a pioneer might have said. A nice extra, but not something many kids would care to read 0r internalize. Who cares that a random character you've never met before is going to mail some letters? I didn't mind reading it, but it's not the most gripping way to learn.
The Oregon Trail has also been long criticized for its treatment of the native Americans. None of the dialogue I encountered in my runs was overtly racist, but they are certainly underrepresented in the experience. At best you get a line from one of them complaining that there sure are a lot of white folks passing through lately. At worst they're treated like goofs that will trivialize portions of the trail if you give them some pants. This is also why the 2021 edition made such a big deal of how they consulted with Native American activists to assure better representation. I haven't played that version yet because I honestly just didn't want to pay 30 bucks for a remake of a game this simplistic, but I will get to it eventually.
So is The Oregon Trail worth playing today? It's definitely a fun experience and there's some educational value to it if you're unfamiliar with the real-world history. It's simple gameplay makes it an easy game to get into, but also leaves it low on interactivity. You shouldn't go into it expecting a game where you get to control every aspect of the journey. It's not a strategy game or a management sim; it's a learning tool with mini-games and some great (albeit unintended) comedic potential.
If that's fine by you, then absolutely give it a try. And be sure to inform your friends when their avatars randomly get bitten by snakes or die of something hilarious.
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