Abiotic Factor

[wonko the sane?]

So sorry to interrupt... Mr. Freeman, but you see...

You're not gordon freeman. *gets beat with a pipe*

So... a CLOSED world, survival crafting game. With graphics straight out of half life 1. And so far... it's pretty awesome. I've killed extra dimensional rats, crafted makeshift weapons, and sat scared and freezing in a dark room while the automated facility power went out at 9 pm. Cause night time must be threatening.

So yeah: you're a cog in the machine of the GATE research facility, and surprise: it's your first day, you just transferred in. Welp, your first day goes sideways before you even get to the bottom of the elevator, and you're off in a glorious PS1 styled survival adventure; crawling through vents, stomping pests, and breaking down anything and everything you can to get resources to craft and survive. Other than the amount of backtracking you do (because of the base building mechanics around the survival stuff.) it genuinely feels like you're gordon freeman's australian cousin.

I've only played about an hour and a half so far: and while it's damned fun own it's own, this is definitely one of those "better with friends" games.

Default game settings means things respawn fairly quickly. Not like furniture, but the odds and ends laying around; staplers, test tubes, duct tape, bundles of pens, paper, lunch trays and the general garbage you would find littering any large scale, multi purpose facility.

The goal is to escape, as the nice voice over the PA keeps telling me. I suspect it will be much harder than she suggests.

 

[Pocket]

I watched [Vinesauce] Vinny play this with a few other people, and I got the impression that for an off-brand Black Mesa, there weren't actually many threats to deal with. Maybe they've hammered that out since then; it was early access. But compared to—and yes, this is the game my brain ended up filing it with—Lethal Company, you're given a lot you're told you need to internalize early on but very little incentive to, versus having to learn through failure pretty much from the word go. Vinny and his friends spent most of the time derping around and rarely being penalized for it, and if they hadn't quit and never come back to it (keep in mind that Vinny is one of the world's biggest Half-Life fans, so his failure to get sucked in is another black mark against it), I suspect they would have been completely lost once the difficulty finally ramped up.

 

[wonko the sane?]

I opened a portal to escape the black mesa ordered through wish... and it dumped me in silent hill. I sabotaged the containment system in the dollar general silent hill for my own ends... and wound up back where I started, weighed down by nuclear power cells, and introducing a new enemy into the facility. I don't even know if I can kill it: it takes damage, but always out performs me so I've yet to win an engagement. I guess I need to make it the next sector (manufacturing.) to find more materials and try to make better weapons.

Or, you know, get better with ones I have... but constantly dying kinda puts a crimped in my plans. And I thought fighting the security robots was hard.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Ha! I moved from the initial cafeteria spawn up to a security office near the manufacturing tunnel, and just after I finished I got the game warning that I was going to get raided that night after lights out.

I puttered around base for a while, then the lights went out and I heard the radio squawk of order soldiers: whom all spawned in the adjoining hallway, and immediately ran afoul of the security bot that patrols that hall at night. I had a beautiful bullet proof glass view of the whole thing.

Sadly: still got killed trying to finish off the security bot. But At least my defenses work. Just need some more lights in there.