Abiotic Factor
Abiotic Factor is what you get if you made Half Life 1 a survival crafting game. Visually it looks similar, there are references to it all over the place, and it's set in a similar kind of location (a secret underground bunker full of scientists and mysterious objects). It's functionally a survival crafting base building game where you go and scavenge materials, create workstations, fill your meters and survive - in a facility full of escaped aliens, crazy artifacts, and portal worlds. Although it feels clunky to start with, it gets more intuitive pretty quickly and is very well designed.
Pros
- Some of the best level design I've seen for years. There are so many alternate paths and ways back
- There are multiple methods of fast travel, including portals, trams and waterways
- So much longer than I expected. Currently 73 hours in and still haven't finished the main story
- Discovering all the crazy entities is really interesting. The facility is a containment structure for objects and creatures found from other universes. The descriptions of all the items is really interesting
- The atmosphere is excellent. I found myself creeping around totally absorbed in the deserted offices
- Huge variety of materials and crafting stations
- Loads of different skills to train
- If you sit down on an office chair, you can roll around on it :D
- You can change all the settings of how the world works, making it super accessible for anyone who wants more or less grind or difficulty. The default inventory and weight limits are ridiculous so I've upped those, and turned off dropping inventory on death
- Traps remain an effective strategy (especially against security robots) for a really long time
- There’s some really cool objects to make in the game, but it can take a long time to get there. For example, it took 30 hours to unlock the thing that auto-sorts items into nearby chests
- Craft from nearby chests
Cons
- The only maps are the ones on the wall, which you can take a leaflet of and save in your journal, but without a "you are here" so just like old games, you need to memorise the layout of the levels. The level design is amazing, but my brain is not.
- There's a chemistry bench which the wiki tells me can make concoctions and weapon coatings, but as far as I can tell after a hundred hours, there's no way to find the recipes in game, and I only know how to distil milk