Despite being a big Half-Life fan, I’ve always been turned off by how impressed the original games’ characters are with Gordon Freeman, treating him like the most capable man alive instead of just a nerd with a crowbar. In-development survival crafting game Abiotic Factor seems to share my concern, imagining if Black Mesa’s regular staff had to deal with the alien threat instead of waiting for Gordon to do it for them.
Developer Deep Field Games’ nods to Half-Life are obvious, but not explicit: you arrive at the GATE research facility for your first day of work, taking a long car and elevator ride instead of Black Mesa’s tram, and meeting lots of security guards and men in labcoats. Something goes wrong, and the facility is overrun with what are totally not headcrabs and vortigaunts. Alone or with others in multiplayer, you have to figure out what’s going on, keep from getting eaten by aliens, and escape. You craft defenses, weapons, and gadgets to help you tackle the threat and move deeper through the facility.
Abiotic Factor might draw narrative inspiration from Half-Life, but it takes mechanical inspiration from a wealth of other games. Borrowing from RPGs, you chose a career and put points into positive and negative traits, levelling up by performing certain actions and unlocking new abilities in a skill tree. The crafting elements will be familiar from games like Subnautica or Don’t Starve, where you need to build certain workstations to obtain other recipes. And then there’s the survival elements, my favorite part of any game: you manage your hunger, thirst, temperature, fatigue, and, in this game, your bathroom needs, which could be read as a bit of–sorry–toilet humor, but for me added wonderfully to the feeling that you’re literally some poor sap with an office job who’s in way over their head and doesn’t even know where the bathroom is.
Adding to the day job vibes is the way the recipe unlocks work. When you pick up a new item, you’ll get the idea for a new recipe. In the crafting menu, you use hints to combine certain items, and then “let your brain do the work” by clicking a giant brain to see if you guessed right. It’s a mini logic puzzle that isn’t too taxing–you get to try again if you guess wrong–but it’s such a fun touch that fits so well in a game about scientists.
My solo playthrough has been a lot of fun, aided by the game’s droll NPC voice acting. I’ve trapped aliens in nets and stomped them to death, made armor out of a filing cabinet, swum in the office pool, and made myself sick eating radioactive alien parts that were clearly radioactive. I’m currently holed up in a little break room because I can close all the doors, sleeping on a nubby couch and waiting for the power to come back on, because the facility’s announcement system told me the power was going to go out but I thought it was just for atmosphere and not an actual warning. Nothing I’ve encountered in my couple of hours with the game has been too hard, but it’s all been just overwhelming enough to keep me from feeling like a hero.
My favorite part has been how physical everything is. Elevator and computer buttons need to be pushed, doors need to be opened and closed, and your work stations need to be powered up by plugging them into power outlets. I took a detour from the orientation to spend all my money on drinks and snacks from the vending machine because it was fun to click all the different buttons. The game’s retro graphics add to this tactility and make everything look samey enough that I always feel a little lost in the giant facility, which wasn’t great when I found myself running away from a surprise enemy I shouldn’t have been surprised by in the dark, shining my flashlight at the office signage in a desperate effort to make the journey back to my sad little safe room.
Abiotic Factor is having a free playtest through January 1, which you can get into via the Steam page. I bet it’s a lot of fun with friends if you can find some to play with you. As a survival game fan I’m enjoying it a lot on my own, taking things at my own pace and spending far too much time doing little survival tasks like gathering water in makeshift bottles than figuring out how to build super weapons. The Steam page mentions a 2024 release, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.
