There’s something properly soothing about pulling up to an empty patch of forest, popping the boot, and slowly turning nothing into somewhere. That’s the entire pitch of I Know a Spot, Bohdan Kvas’s cosy camping builder, and for the first half hour or so it absolutely nails it. You pick a location, mountains, lakeside, snowy woodland, whatever takes your fancy, roll in with your car and your dog, and start unpacking. Tents, chairs, stoves, lanterns, bits of camping tat you didn’t know you needed until the game hands it to you, all of it gets scattered around at your own pace. No timer, no objective, no score ticking up in the corner. Just you, deciding where the folding chair goes. In theory, this is awesome.
And for a fiver on Steam, the spots you end up with genuinely do look lovely. There’s a real knack to the way it’s all put together, the kind of thing that makes you want to sit back and just look at your own campsite for a bit once you’re done, rather than immediately packing it in for the next one. It’s a proper little dollhouse-em-up (it’ll catch on), and when it’s working, it’s a nice place to switch your brain off for twenty minutes.
The trouble is I Know a Spot doesn’t always get out of its own way. The interface is the first snag, and it’s a fairly serious one. It’s easy, too easy, to back out to the main menu without quite realising that’s what you’ve done, and doing so wipes out everything you’ve just spent half an hour building. There’s no warning, no “are you sure”, just a quiet little reset of your afternoon. For a game built entirely around unhurried, low-stakes creativity, that’s a genuinely bruising thing to run into, and it happened to me more than once before I learned to tread carefully around every exit prompt like it was live wiring.
Then there’s the lighting, which stings a bit more because it’s tangled up in the whole appeal of the thing. You get lanterns, torches, all sorts of lovely little light sources to dot around your spot, exactly the kind of stuff that should turn a decent-looking campsite into a really atmospheric one once the sun goes down. Except you can’t actually switch any of them on. I went looking to make sure I hadn’t just missed a button somewhere, and found other players asking the exact same question on the game’s own Steam forum, unanswered, with nothing to suggest it’s been addressed since. Your car headlights do work, so there is light in the world, it’s just coming from your car rather than the lantern you carefully placed by the tent. So instead of the gently glowing night scenes the concept practically begs for, you get a car park situation, lovely wide dark, and one narrow beam pointed at whatever happens to be in front of the bonnet. Considering the nicest photos are taken at night, the lighting shortfall is what burns the most. It could’ve had battery-pack-powered string of LED lights, working lanterns and so much more, but… no. Just the headlights and the campfire, which is pretty in itself but doesn’t quite cut enough mustard.
Since launch there’s also been an open world mode added, letting you just drive off and find your own spot rather than picking from the preset locations, which is exactly the sort of thing this game should be building towards. Have a proper poke around the edges of it, though, and you can break straight out of the intended map and end up stranded in a bare desert with the game’s entire asset library hovering above you like some sort of anti-gravity jumble sale, tents and lanterns and folding chairs just drifting in mid-air with nowhere to land. It’s the kind of thing you stumble into by accident rather than go looking for, but it rather undercuts the sense that this is a finished, polished little world you’re pottering about in. And no, before you ask, the post-update lamps still don’t switch on out there either. Just the car.
It’s a shame, because take those things away and this is a genuinely relaxing way to spend a bit of time. The building itself feels good, there’s a decent spread of gear to decorate with, and hopping between locations, preset or self-found, keeps it from going stale too quickly, at least across a session or two. It’s the sort of game that’s very much at its best in short, unhurried bursts, ten or fifteen minutes here and there rather than a big sit-down session, and taken like that, it mostly delivers on what it says on the box.
Whether that’s worth six out of ten depends on how forgiving you’re willing to be about a cosy game tripping over its own furniture, both figuratively and, in the case of that floating desert, quite literally. I’ve landed on it being worth that mark because what’s actually here, the building, the atmosphere, the general vibe of the thing, does work when it’s allowed to, and the price is very friendly. But I’d go in knowing you’re getting a demo of a really nice idea rather than the finished, cosy dream it’s selling on the store page, and be careful with the menu buttons, because the game certainly won’t remind you to.
Not for everyone, especially if losing an evening’s work to a stray menu click is going to properly wind you up, but if you can treat it as a chill little sandbox rather than something you’re building toward, there’s a nice spot in here somewhere.
Reviewed on PC
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