'I'm not a big fan of survival games,' says director of 2024's best survival game

My last few weeks with Abiotic Factor have been a cure for survival crafting burnout. I thought I'd never want to look at another crafting bench again, but it turns out, all I really needed was a genuinely fresh perspective on survival crafting to get on board. What first drew me in was Abiotic's setting, a post-disaster underground lab inspired by Half-Life's Black Mesa facility.

You won't find choppable trees in the cold, echoing halls of the Gate Cascade Research Facility. You can't forage for berries or build a log cabin, but you can spend your last dollar on a vending machine root beer and smash up a CRT monitor for its useful innards. You don't play as a blank slate or seasoned survivalist—you're a schlubby scientist with no idea what they're up against, a fact you're reminded of every time you vomit up dubious soup, get so sleepy your eyelids narrow, or have to find a bathroom before you have a serious accident in your pants.

For Deep Field games founder Geoff «Zag» Keene, these deep but «simple systems» were crucial to making a survival game that he'd actually like to play, because he's not usually the biggest fan of the genre.

«So I've always had this interest in survival games, but I'm not a big fan of survival games,» Keene told PC Gamer in an interview last week. «I play them with friends, but I always find them to be quite grindy and kind of boring.»

One of Deep Field's goals early on was to deconstruct the typical loop of so many survival games (chopping down trees, building bases, maintaining them) and only keep the parts they liked.

«I liked the exploration of [survival crafting], I liked the adventure, and I like the roleplay of it too. I like sitting around campfires and chilling with your buds, you know, and I think a lot of games don't promote that a lot,» he said. «So that's why sitting is one of our major features in Abiotic Factor. It's actually how you rest and heal in a lof of ways. We wanted to promote that environment.»

You have to eat,