Last updated on November 29th, 2025 at 10:25 am
NEO Scavenger – Roleplaying Game Review
NEO Scavenger is a Roleplaying/Strategy/Entertainment game from Blue Bottle Games, LLC, first launched in 26th July 2017.
It’s rated 17+ and currently has 288+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes NEO Scavenger Stand Out
Play the acclaimed PC survival RPG on your tablet and smartphone! (Free unlimited time demo, with IAP to unlock full version. Note that only full version can save progress.)
NEO Scavenger is a game where you must survive in the wasteland long enough to figure out who you are. Each turn, you must decide where to go, how to scavenge for supplies, and how to deal with anything and anyone you encounter. And with each passing minute, the pit in your stomach grows, your dehydration worsens, your muscles tire, and your body temperature drops in the cold autumn air. Choose your starting abilities carefully, because they and your wit are the only tools you have in the apocalypse!
FEATURES:
Unique Setting – Near-future, post-apocalyptic Michigan with local cryptids and folklore. And something else beneath the surface…
Turn-Based Play – Take your time with each turn, and play at your own pace. Save and quit when you want, and resume later.
No Grinding – There are no XP in NEO Scavenger. No levelling-up. Instead, progress comes from learning how to play the game better, and using your strengths to your advantage.
Semi-Random – Much of the map is randomized each game, including the location of ruins, creatures, weather, and certain quest branches.
Sandbox or Story – Search for clues to your identity, what happened, and who's hunting you. Or simply test your mettle against man and nature alike. Play how you want!
Abilities and Flaws – Choose abilities and flaws each time you play. Different combos unlock different abilities and quest branches.
Crafting – Extensive crafting system which allows for substitutions of similar items. Make a rifle scope from half a pair of binoculars, or a noise trap from a pill bottle and pebbles.
Desperate Combat – Detailed combat with moves like "Tackle," "Lure," "Kick While Down," "Demand Surrender," and "Threaten."
Realistic Wounds – Creatures have complex wound simulation, with multiple wound locations, infection, bleeding, and pain management.
Realistic Metabolism – Hypothermia, fatigue, thirst, hunger, disease, intoxication, shelter…everything is tracked.
Realistic Inventory – Complex inventory system with slots for holding, wearing, containers, and more. Fit items in grid spaces, and manage encumbrance.
Hex-Based World Map – Navigate ruins, hills, forests, and plains in a hex-based map. Line-of-sight, elevation, and daylight matters.
Tracking – Creatures leave their tracks and spoor on the map, which can be followed by others. Players can also hide their tracks.
Hiding – Players can use hiding to avoid being seen while traveling the map, as well as during story encounters.
Hunting – Trap small game for food and fur, or track and kill larger prey on the map for butchering.
Foraging – Search for edible plants and water, and use special skills to identify what's safe to eat.
Creature AI – Wandering creatures go about their own business, hunting, scavenging, and hoarding. Morale affects their choices, and some will gang-up and cause trouble.
Dynamic Weather – Temperature, rainfall, and night/day are based on real-world data for autumn in the area. If you live long enough, you may see snow fall.
FULL VERSION ADDS:
Save System – Save progress between sessions. However, if you die, that's it. NEO Scavenger is balanced around a single difficulty level: permadeath. Save games will be deleted if you die. So choose every action carefully!
Haunting Soundtrack – Music composed by Josh Culler, specifically for NEO Scavenger, plays periodically, lending an atmosphere of loneliness and desperation.
Hacking – Use hacking skills to unlock scavenged laptops, cellphones, smartphones, and tablets. Mine them for paydata, or snoop through personal files.
Detroit – Take refuge from the wasteland in one of mankind's last bastions of safety. Buy supplies, get medical care, and seek clues in a cyberpunk-styled city.
More items, crafting, creatures, encounters, and a larger map.
This Roleplaying game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, NEO Scavenger is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 28th November 2017
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
- Added instant tooltips. Touch and hold blank space, then drag around to get instant tooltips.
- Fixed DMC access obstructed by UI.
- Fixed crash due to crafting certain demo recipes.
- Fixed bandage offset bug.
- Added stack counts to container preview.
- Fixed rotated items in containers.
Download & Availability
NEO Scavenger is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get NEO Scavenger on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
First and foremost is it perfect? No. Does it have bugs and wonky mess at times? Yes. Is it still considered one of the best games in iOS period? Most definitely and Ill recommend it especially if you love these kind of games.
We bought this game already but its asking us to buy it again. Not cool. Never mind tried to buy it again and it just restored the game. Nice.
Pls make a way to link our steam account to the mobile game we dont wanna spend more money.
The game is officially broken on iOS! You will only load up to a black screen, and then immediately try to request a refund. Apple might not give you it. Our advice? Buy it off Steam, its the better version anyway.
Woke up, killed a dogman, skinned it, wore the coat we made out of it. Went to a truck stop, ate human flesh and faught a robot. Went to a tribe and got food, water, and a weapon. Went to a mental institution and saved a cult, then got a gun. Went to Detroit, same thing as real life and got a shotgun and pistol along with S.W.A.T gear. Went to a carnival and got jumped by 6 naked hobos and got kicked to death. 10/10 would spend another 21 hours again.
Just the agonizing, grueling, horrific game of Detroit desperation youve always loved! Now you can take it in your pocket so at work, or in the bathroom and on the bus you cant escape it! At anytime you can have your own happy place, its just that this happy place is devoid of life, joy, relaxation and with a lot more metal scrap and enfield horrors. Some of the controls in this game may cause physical pain but if you decided to download this then you already have fallen to masochism. Abandon all hope ye who launch this game. Side effects may include: hatred towards Michigan, sudden interest in trapping and botany, constant fear of being stalked by werewolves and incessant consumption of berries and ketchup packets. We love this game.
Like we said absolutely amazing game the combat/survival system is amazing but no saving really? We want to pay the 10 extra to see if it gets better but we need to make sure first.
Please fix the atn enclave been having issues with the trading post.
If youve ever wanted to experience dying of hypothermia while being chewed in half by a dog man this is the game for you everything from randomized Loot to getting stun locked by a deer and loosing 8 hours of progress however we will its the journey that sells it and this is one of whiskey abusing and dog smacking joy.
We have the game on pc and bought the full game again here to support the dev. This game is absolutely amazing, with crazy depth and great turn based mechanics, but please devs update for iPhone X type screens, please. The interface is already hard enough to navigate, and the small aspect ratio just makes it harder.
We actually found out about what this game was on the iPhone it should it was free and we thought Id give it a chances we were mind blow its so in-depth and vary difficulty we highly suggest buying the full game its much easier and you also get more things.
Good game, but hard, dont get attached to your saved games, you will die a lot.
Ive been playing this game for about an hour and its really good the only thing we dont like is when you hold your finger over an object the text that says take/drop item comes up which picks up the item or drops it for you is right under your finger and it picks it up or drops it when you dont want to but other than that small thing its a really good game and works really good with the phone.
Honestly this has taken over our life our wife has left us and Im addicted to this game we have lost our job our home and our self confidence we go from store to store charging our phone just to play this game. The game is good we would play again 5/5.
Love this game! Very deep and engaging. Simple to pick up – hard to master. Interface is somewhat challenging at times – but you learn to live with it.
Its magical and fills the odd craving of a game we need that we can pick up and put down on the fly.
We love this game. Ive got it for Steam, Android and iOS. We just wish mods worked on mobile.
We have this on PC so we basically can already say we have had a amazing experience with this game and you should consider downloading it. Would prefer some updates but hey its free on here we guess.
Seriously enjoying it. It has issues with speed. But it might be our fat fingers.
We've owned this game for years, and upon finding out that it was available on IOS we bought it again. It's a slow-paced, punishing game. You will die many times before you begin to feel like you're beating the game- and even then death is always just around to corner.
Very fun. Love that we can make our hobo beat up everything, and everyone and win. When we try to take off bandages though. The dudes just teleports off screen. Causing us to get infections. Also it crashes sometimes when we craft too much. All in all fun.
We mean its real good survival game but Im still trying to find a specific one but Im not able to find it.
Even though this game we so old we still enjoy playing this game. But we wish that the game developers would add a cheat mode where you can use all of the skills and a cheat were you could add anything into your inventory that would make the game so much more fun in our opinion.
So far we have put in a couple of hours in the game and we can say it is difficult, but great game overall. But a couple of bugs have prevented us from giving this game 5 stars. First on mobile, you may end up losing things for no reason, just due to how clunky the controls can be. Second, if you use the minimap, once you exit from minimap, there is a chance your character is invisible unless you move him. Thats all we found so far, but we will see if there is any more.
Ok Ill admit its a really good game but Im having problems with it crashing please fix this we know you havent updated it in a while but please make it stop crashing.
This game is very gritty and unsympathetic but overall is fun and interesting, we love this game overall but there is a bit of problems we can talk about. There are at times where the game crashes constantly and we lost all of the progress we did.
Sometimes it crash alot , fix it plssssss however great game :)))))).
This is one of our favorite pc games. Hardcore, believable post-apocalyptic survivor with a story that relies on you, the player, to uncover. The app is functional, but since it is a direct port, the graphics and text arent optimized. The dev did add a few UI options that make it playable. The app is good as an intro, or to get your hobo fix on the go. Super excited for their next game, Ostranauts, a space sim/rpg in the same setting.
Once you get a hang of the controls and inventory it is a fantastic game. We personally would recommend nerfing botany skill a little but other than that it is very enjoyable.
We love the game a lot but we recently have a problem where we cant access a save after we progress to a certain point in the game.
We would like to play the full game, but we are unable to find it on the app store.
Played the free version for a couple of hours to get a feel for it, then decided to get the full version so we could save… But the Full Version button on the main menu simply refused to work. We tried everything we could think of, but ultimately had to close the game and lose our save before the button became functional again. Im holding off on the purchase for a while, but its pretty fun.
This game is one of the most fantastic survival games to ever come out. Unfortunately, the game crashes after about 25 continuous minutes of play, and the save files for two of our good runs have been obliterated.
First, this game is amazing. Well worth the price – innovative combat, fascinating story lines, great random loot. We love it. A must-buy, if you're into survival and turn-based games. That said, until it stabilizes we're giving it up. Having played probably 40+ hours, we've become more afraid of losing our save file to a crash than we have the enemies or elements in game. Playing on our late-gen retina iPad, we've lost at least 4 save files to crashes, all with hours of playtime on them. We get not wanting people to save scum, but we wish there was a way to backup the file. Watching our carefully protected, organized, scavenged loot vanish in a crash again is just too much. Looking forward to updates, or to whatever Blue Bottle does next.
Its great so far yet as the title suggests their are a few problems. First is the UI, its hard to select items and choose where you want to put them specifically. Another problem is trying to select a item just to see what it is. More often then not we eat pills when Im trying to read what pill it is. We understand its their first mobile game (to our knowledge) and that their are going to be problems in porting the game but when inventory is such a big factor it sorta ruins the experience. You can play around and get use to it and they even added a zoom in feature but we just find it difficult. Still, keep up the good work! Edit: we forgot to add that theirs a glitch that keeps stacking the camp benefits over and over and it doesnt clear. This just makes the messages go off screen and is more of a annoyance then anything. This doesnt happen much but just saying. Edit2: Using the hacking skill we cant scroll through stacked txt files and such so we need to remove and review them one at a time. Just a annoyance. (Got the full game and we can say that its worth it.).
Overall the game is just as solid as it was on the PC. Although we feel the interface is a bit fidgety and wonky. We have to use a stylus for micro management of inventory. But definitely worth the 10 quid.
Short Review: our game crashes after 20-30 minutes of gameplay, makes us lose any good loot we obtained or makes us lose a lot of progress. Please fix this.
This game has too much bugs never connected and play this game with a headphone its too glitchy now fix your freaking game.
Crafting is a little bit complex but once you get the hang of its fun. Scavenging is a nice challenge. The injury system is decent. Our only real grip is that the combat system is absolutely atrocious when it comes to melee idk if we just dont know how it works but we find ourselves loosing to an un armed opponent more often then not even when Im armed with crowbar or wrench. Great game if you can stand dying to unarmed npcs a bit.
The controls, the 10 dollar price tag, etc Killed it for us. Plus some of the quest items you acquire can only be figured out via the wiki. Then the rng, dont even get us started. The game really does need some fixing. If those things were fixed though, Im sure this game would be amazing. Im sure its a lot more fun on the PC w/o these control issues.
We love this game on PC, but this game is just frustrating on mobile. Moving and interacting with items, which is a pretty big part of the game, takes forever, and is very inconsistent. The quick bar at the top right is basically useless, as it takes so much time to open it, scroll through the option you need, that it would have taken you less time than if you had just used the context menu. The only thing the dev did to accommodate mobile users is add a zoom feature, which we feel could zoom a little more. Everything in this game takes about 3 times longer than on PC.
…at least, only one that cant be dealt with. Occasionally, save files cannot be loaded, and attempting to do so will crash the app. The only way to get around this is to abandon your playthrough, and start a new game. Im a huge fan of the PC version, and would absolutely rate 5 stars if it werent for this bug.
Looks like a good game, but the UI is confusing and unwieldy.
We found this game on mobile first, and we loved it. But the interface is so tiny and difficult to use that we bought the PC version so we could actually play it. Now we only play the PC version because the mobile interface is unusable for us. How big do you think our eyes are, and how tiny do you think our fingers are? You cant just port a PC game to mobile without any UI changes and call it a day. On a PC with a mouse this is a different game. On mobile its a frustrating experience of zooming in (with just one level of zoom) to see the miniature icons and attempt to tap and hold on it. And Im playing on the iPad Air 2, not the mini. Devs, you need to modify the UI for mobile so that everything fits on the screen and doesnt require zooming in. Theres too much screen space wasted on empty inventory or darkened map. The inventory screens should open as larger windows rather than try to cram everything on the main screen, and you need to allow for easier paging/tabbing or scrolling. The item icons and buttons should be like 4x larger, and rather than tap-and-hold it should be tap to select an item and bring up a pop-up with description and actions.
This is an older game, so we're not sure it's even supported anymore. The inventory system is broken on the mobile version, and items will disappear, as well as cause the game to lock into one mode or another. Get it on pc, not here.
We cant purchase the full version. The game stays in side mode and we cant access the keyboard. We are also unable to press the done button on the top right of the screen.
Game needs to take advantage of the entirety of the screen feels like theres so much space wasted and its hard to see what your clicking 90% of the time and ends up ruining the experience.
Really cool game.. Well at least for the couple times we play it.. Until it loses our progress and prompts us to start a new game. Highly frustrating. We certainly will not purchase this (because we were very much leaning towards buying full version) until you can hard save your progress. A game this involved needs be have your progress maintained. Otherwise, its just a tease. Reading your reviews, losing your game progress seems to plague this otherwise awesome game. Ive yet to receive a response from support. Would be a cool game if we could save our progress.
Love it on PC, cant say we do on mobile. Its extremely awkward with how small it is and the UI isnt very finger tapping friendly. If the UI was completely re-designed Id give another try but not right now.
If you like these type of games like we do then get this game on the PC because the UI ten times better then playing on your tablet or phone. Way too hard to do things with the poor UI and the PC version far superior then this version.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.2.8
- Size: 112.23 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes, Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References, Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor, Infrequent/Mild Medical/Treatment Information, Frequent/Intense Horror/Fear Themes, Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Blue Bottle Games, LLC
Last updated: 28th November 2017 | Genre: Roleplaying, Strategy | Developer: Blue Bottle Games, LLC