The Wastes is a truly massive, extremely random and highly addictive text rpg. While it's not exactly clear whether it was a neuclear war, an alien invasion, a plague of mutants, or indeed any or all of a half a hundred disasters that have overtaken the world, The world of The Wastes is certainly a very different world to the one most people are familiar with. The Wastes is a world of vast deserts, and city ruins, radioactive craters and soring mountains populated by twisted, mutated creatures, mad cultists, and armed settlements of survivers more likely to treat any stranger as a threat than a friend.

Your task in the game is simply to survive as you traverse the diverse and ever changing wastes, batling many foes, looting corpses, exploring dark and ruined bunkers and dungeons and trading with the odd wandering merchant.

Fortunately, your chances of survival will increase as you gather stronger (though sometimes rather strange), weapons, level up and train your abilities (earning powerful perks into the bargain), find food and other useful items (though be careful of ingesting too much radiation), and perhaps risk the unknown powers of various coloured vials which could give you anything from a debilitating disease to a lizard tale and claws for more effective abilities in combat.

Complex though all this sounds, one particularly nice thing is just how easy The Wastes is to play. Functioning rather like an old style console window dos rpg (though it will run on any version of Windows), most of the game involves traversing regions by just hitting enter to continue and reading the descriptions of what you find, as well as how much of the current area you've passed through. When choices are needed such as which item to pick up, what a merchant has to sell or whether to risk venturing into a dungeon, numbers are provided such as "to loot the corpse hit 1, to carry on press 2" This makes it extremely quick and simple to play, with no need to memorize complex commands or even navigate mazelike areas, though as you gain more items and abilities , you will find yourself needing to make some fairly crytical choices, especially when deciding whether it is a good time to fight or flee. .

Though having a few atmospheric sounds and music tracks to add to the ambience, the wastes is primarily a text game, though a highly specialized and complex one.

One particularly unique thing about The Wastes, is that nearly everything in the game from the regions to the monsters, as well as items and weapons is randomly generated. This means not only are two games of The Wastes never the same, but also you don't necessarily know what is around the next corner, particularly sinse The Wastes is deliberately designed so that you can never be absolutely certain you won't run into something impossible to defeat or find yourself hit with a debilitating desease, indeed in The Wastes the only sure thing is that you will eventually die, though fortunately the game keeps a graveyard folder which reccords your character's achievements for posterity. .

The Wastes is also one of the most accessible games imaginable. As with many classic Cconsole style games,any screen reader should be able to read all the text as standard (though a virtual curser might be necessary on occasion, as might the ability to scroll the window). The developer himself has been a major member of the forum, and has regularly inserted many access fixes into the game, these include the ability to turn off ascii (hit 3 when the game starts to go to options and then hit 5 to activate), alternative text for things expressed only with colour like item quality in the game, and even more screen reader friendly punctuation and a full screen or windowed mode to show more of the text in a console window. .

The game can also be modded to create ever more types of items, monsters and other things to encounter, and a number of packs are still available, plus of course the possibility exists to create more in the future.

Major things were planned for the game, but due to a highly nasty code crash in November of 2015, development abruptly stopped. While this did mean that many planned features such as the ability to save games, buy town buildings, own slaves and go on quests sadly never made it into the game, it did leave behind one of the most addictive, complex and truly unique rpgs available in an accessible form, and a game that should still provide hours of gameplay as you traverse the ever morphing wastes waiting to see what nasty mutant has you for tea next or what terrible disease you contract.