Put the words “Survival,” “Crafting,” and “Early Access” in front of me and I’ll shake my head like a child being offered the luxury of veggies for dinner.  It’s not my steez.  Hasn’t been and probably never will be.  It’s not off to have cruxes within your gaming catalog that you just don’t like, it’s natural to not enjoy everything provided to you in the gaming world!  But dammit, one game that highlights all three of those words piqued my interest just enough to put some funds into it.  I’m 65 hours in, I’m fully invested.  I’m counting down days between content updates.  It will clearly be in the running for Game of the Year when it 1.0’s.  Y’all, you should really be playing Abiotic Factor.

Abiotic’s plot plays like a mix of Half-Life, SCP, and stuffed with humorous shenanigans.  As a GATE employee you’re tasked with explaining the unexplainable: searching and researching multi-dimensional substances, scenarios, and scenery that goes beyond Earthly comprehension or explanation.  When a containment breach turns your workplace into a warzone, you’re the complex’s last hope for help as you band with your fellow scientists to craft and supply your way out of this mess: one dimension at a time.

The first piece that really caught my attention was the character creation, not only did I make a near 1:1 replica of myself, but the game’s current difficulty is based on a give-and-take Trait system that coincides with your choosing of your character’s Job.  Each of the 9 Jobs gives your character a different starting path to the over a dozen Skills you will level up over the course of the game.  I chose the Trans-Kinematic Researcher, which gives me bonuses to strength-like skills and specializes in defensive combat: I was playing cautious not knowing what the hell I was walking into.  From there I was given 8 points to slot into my Traits, but if you want some of the nicer positive traits, you’ll need to take a few negative traits.

The way this works is that taking a negative trait like healing slower, having a weak bladder, or being narcoleptic grants you extra trait points.  So while you may not be able to sleep well, you can have positive traits like gaining more XP, having extra Hotbar slots, or being able to drink tainted water with no consequence.  Abiotic Factor is planning on having actual difficulty sliders for the worlds in terms of enemy amount and style, but for now it is a fun challenge to see just how many bad luck sliders your character can take while being functionally sound.

You’re tasked with the normal fare of survival sliders: hunger, thirst, sleep, and bathroom breaks.  But the style of play mirrors that of an old Source title from the ‘90s and early ‘00s.  Melee combat is snappy and the gunplay is quick but you are a scientist, not a soldier, so being careful and advantageous is paramount to your survival because everyone hurts.  From the dimensional grunts to the gun-wielding minions of The Order, treading carefully and hypothesizing your actions is worth it to save your ammo and your bandages.

You’ll need all the materials you can get as well as the different sections of the GATE Cascade Research Facility and the various Portal Worlds you’ll discover will take you to all different ends of the survival spectrum.  I don’t want to spoil many of the places you’ll go since traversing through each portal for the first time is a luxury I wish I had back, because the range in areas is such a diverse bunch.  Most areas you wouldn’t think to be in focus of what GATE is all about, but then you’re just so enveloped by the thoughts and ideas put together by Deep Field Games that you’ll think to yourself, “Yeah, I could see how this enemy could be integrated into this game,” before you head back to your world and realize now they’re there with you at your home base.

The amount of tools in your survival kit is massive as well, with several weapons, armor, base building materials, cooking recipes, and much more.  I could go on for another 3 pages of text just running through all the little bells and whistles regarding what you can make but the best stamp of approval I can find is I’m still finding new things after nearly 3 days of logged playtime and it just keeps getting better with each update.

The nicest component of it all is the buttery smooth online experience I’ve had.  Abiotic Factor can handle up to 6 players in one lobby but as I’ve been traversing through each sector with a dedicated scientist buddy, us two have had zero crashes and very minimal slowdown located only within loading areas.  The stability of the game as I’ve played on and off for about 2 months now has never faltered and has handled multiple updates with ease, which I can’t stress enough is going to be a selling point with all the stuff already in the game going on at once.

With the 1.0 release aiming for Winter, there’s only a few months left between the current product and its expected finalized state.  But I can say with full confidence that what is out now is head and shoulders better than anything I was expecting and is an absolute steal at its current price of $25 (the price will go up when it releases).  With so many more mysteries coming in the next few months on top of the scrumptious amount of content already available, Abiotic Factor is honing in on being the game to beat on year-end lists, whether it be this year or next.