Abiotic Factor
Abiotic Factor is what you get if you made Half Life 1 a survival crafting game. Visually it looks incredibly 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 base 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
- The atmosphere is excellent. I found myself creeping around totally absorbed in the deserted offices
- Wide variety of materials and crafting stations
- Rewarding exploration with lots of secret passages to find, and well designed shortcuts
- 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 really long time to get there. For example, I just got the thing that auto-deposits thing you put in it to nearby storage, and I've played 30 hours
- Discovering all the crazy objects is really interesting. There's a lot of lore about where each object / creature was found and what it does. Some of them are funny, some are scary
Cons
- Voice acting isn't great
- The game, as a whole, feels a bit clunky. I think it's deliberate, but it definitely plays a little like a 90s game
- 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.