Growing up as a kid in a rural community often meant making your own fun. Going into town wasn’t really on the cards most of the time, what with our parents out at work and no public transportation available outside the school bus that only came twice a day. So with active imaginations and large swaths of eucalypt forests around us we’d usually end up exploring out there, building stick forts and creating elaborate stories about what we were doing. Whilst many other survival games have the same ingredients that Abiotic Factor does none of them managed to capture that feeling I had as a kid building stick forts out in the bush. Couple that with the SCP inspired storyline and you’ve got all the ingredients you need for getting up to all kinds of delicious mischief with your crew.
GATE is home to the world’s greatest scientists, engineers and numerous secrets that the greater world aren’t privy to. You’ve been selected to join them bringing with you world leading skills in your chosen field and all you need to do to get working is complete some straightforward orientation training. However a cataclysmic event befalls the facility and suddenly you’re face to face with the truth of what GATE is: a home for the research on the borders of science that dives right into the paranormal. Now you have only one job: survive.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was based on the original Source engine given the aesthetic that the developers have gone for here. It is, in fact, an Unreal 5 game that’s been lovingly de-made to give you those beautiful low-poly models that we were all in awe of some 25+ years ago. You would hope that this would also mean that performance would be great but alas, it isn’t. I will admit that I haven’t tried to optimise the performance settings at all, so there are probably frames to be gained somewhere, but even a modest base seems to have noticeable impacts on the framerate. Part of me wants to argue that it’s just part of the experience, I mean no one was getting 100+ FPS in the original half life, but it still feels odd having so-so performance with a game that looks like this.
Abiotic Factor is an open world survival/base builder focused entirely on the PVE experience. Whilst you could theoretically do an entire run without setting up anywhere permanently the game is designed around you finding a place you like, setting up camp there and then doing runs out to various parts of the facility to continue the evolution of your tech whilst progressing the narrative. There’s the usual smattering of resource gathering, crafting, base building and combat mechanics that this genre has popularised all of which have a distinctive Half-Life-esque vibe to them. There’s also a very in-depth character progression system which is all tied to undertaking the various tasks that you’ll need to do to survive in ABF. The scale of the game is huge but thankfully much of that complexity and scale is hidden from you until you make the requisite progress. All in all there’s a lot to chew on here making it one of those perfect pick up/put down games played with your chosen crew.
The game starts you off with making you choose what effectively amounts to a character class which would make you think that you’re locking in a specialisation that will determine what you do in the game. That’s not really the case though thankfully, instead those initial skill points you spend will make levelling that particular category of skills quicker than any other player. There are some particular benefits that will provide some quality of life for you (like me, who doesn’t need to poop as often, neat!) but in all honesty they aren’t going to change much about how the game plays out for you. However it’s still very much worth talking with your crew about various different roles within your group as it’s much better to have everyone specialising in something rather than everything to make progressing certain tech trees quicker. For me that was cooking and fishing, providing some benefits and materials that aren’t available from any other source.
Base building is comprehensive and complex, giving you a lot of different things to build, upgrade and enhance in order to make you and your crew more effective. There’s also a wealth of different decorative things that you can scavenge and build, giving you even more options to personalise your base. If you’re like us your original base will grow organically, attempting to make use of in-situ resources as much as possible as you get a feel for what you need most. As you progress through the game you’ll unlock a variety of quality of life upgrades that make the minutiae of managing a growing base that much easier. Simple labels were a revelation for us at one point until we unlocked the pads and database that auto-stored everything for us with an interface we could search to find things we’d inevitably lost in a chest somewhere.
Combat is simple and a bit clunky with a few categories of weapons that dictates how you’ll engage with the various enemies you’ll be stumbling across. Broadly speaking they’re ranged and melee with some sub-categories in each of them. The skill levels associated with them will unlock certain benefits as you use those weapons more so, like most things in this game, it pays to specialise in one of them rather than trying to spread yourself across multiple different types. In terms of effectiveness it seems to vary wildly with some of the cheap, easy to get weapons being amazing and some of the more expensive ones (like say, Order weapons with uncraftable ammo) being really lacklustre. That being said you’ll quickly pick up on which ones are the most effective for your preferred build and crew. I myself am a sharp melee enjoyer and that seems to have served me well so far.
Even though this game has been in Early Access for some time before going 1.0 it’s still got some issues that linger on even to this day. There are numerous areas that you can get access to before they fully load in which, normally, just gives you a black box before everything pops in. I’ve had that go pear shaped on me at least once, seeing me fall through the world which was only solved by me having a personal teleporter equipped (or death, in any other situation). Performance issues are present in multiple different areas too, especially in later game areas that have a lot more going on in them. The interface can also feel a bit clunky at times, requiring you to either juggle inventory slots or use the less-than-optimal ring interface for certain things. Cooking soups is a great example of this which can become a bit of a chore when you’re trying to cook multiple of them.
I need to split my assessment of the narrative into 2 parts: the core game narrative and the emergent one that comes from my crew’s experience of exploring the world. The former is mostly recounted through discovering recordings and talking to various NPCs. The world that the devs have built is deep and rich but it’s delivered in much the same fashion as say Elden Ring and its peers are. Lots of interesting tidbits, some exposition here and there but pulling a clear thread through it all isn’t the point nor is it the game’s focus. It’s still very fun though, delivered in such a way that I think will vibe for anyone who’s spent time working for a large corporation or organisation.
The latter part is of course going to be very personal to you and those who you share time with in ABF. We have a great tale of making our first base in the gym, taking out our first robots, moving the base to the picturesque Torii portal, to now where we’re roleplaying as the champions of late-stage capitalism seeking to exploit the everloving shit out of the paranormal. There’s in-jokes, shared trauma and all the things that made me think of my time as a youth building stick forts out in the bush. If nothing else ABF is a great backdrop for a bunch of mates having endless banter about the game, life and anything else at all.
Abiotic Factor is the open world survival sandbox I didn’t know I was missing. To be sure it’s rough around the edges in many places but it gets so much more right that it’s easy to gloss over them. It’s a game that rewards spending a lot of time with it, something that put me off at first but now that it serves as a kind of touchstone for catching up with my friends I know see that as a big positive. Every other day I’ll spend a couple hours with them building, fixing and exploring as we look to the next cool thing we want to build. It’s a game I see myself playing for a long time to come.
Rating: 9.0/10
Abiotic Factor is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $50.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of…12.1 days? (Xbox’s time counting is goofed, I think it’s more like 20 hours) with 58% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also currently available on Gamepass.
