This month, fans of Fortnite's Save the World mode got the news they'd been dreading: Epic announced it planned to "slow down" development of new content for the mode and put its seasonal updates on an annual basis. The writing had been on the wall for years: Save the World was the mode Fortnite originally launched with, but it was quickly upstaged by the arrival of Battle Royale, which went on to become a global phenomenon. So where's a dedicated Save the World player to go now? The answer may well be Drake Hollow.
Drake Hollow is the upcoming release from The Molasses Flood, the studio responsible for the charming but dark The Flame in the Flood in 2016. With Drake Hollow, the developer has kept much of the American rust belt charm of its first game, but transported it into a more whimsical mash-up of Fortnite and Narnia. As a young person pulled away from a vaguely Appalachian industrial town, you find yourself on an island surrounded by strange mist, taking advice from a talking crow who says your help is required to heal the world and bring back the drakes.
Having played too many videogames, I naturally assumed he was talking about dragons. 'Drake' can also mean a male duck, but as it turns out the crow isn't talking about them, either. The drakes in the Hollow are adorable little radish babies who have been driven underground by a malevolent force called the Feral, and it's up to you to cleanse the archipelago of evil so they can return to their full strength.