So there’s a passage in biographical novel The Moon & Sixpence where art connoisseur Dirk Stroeve spends months helping painter Charles Strickland recover from a life-threatening illness. Once well, Strickland returns the favour by promptly nicking Dirk’s wife Blanche. Strickland eventually leaves her, Blanche gargles acid and dies, and a hangdog Dirk returns to the apartment to find Strickland’s nude painting of Blanche, mocking his heartbreak. Manic and inconsolable, Dirk grabs a paint scraper and flings himself at the painting ready to destroy it, but can’t. He’s overcome by an appreciation for the work; in awe of the object that mocks him.
I get it, really I do. I’m standing before horrible strategy game Anoxia Station, with my paint scraper, ready to gouge a hole in it for making me feel like shit. Stressed. Anxious. Irritated. Exhausted. When Anoxia Station wants to tell you that temperature has dropped to dangerous levels, it shoves a steamy, cracked-ice overlay on screen that’s so opaque it makes interacting with the game a chore. I should be furious.
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And, sure, I can’t actually recommend Anoxia Station. It’s a mostly unpleasant, gruelling time. But, if I was just to leave a description below of how, even through all this, it still had me absorbed with its crushing sense of place, churning prose, and six-minutes-to-midnight mortal panic, I couldn’t very well stop you trying it out, could I?
This is a turn-based city builder that has you grapple with radiation, brutal temperatures, and giant bugs, while burrowing a massive mining station deeper into an earth whose benign processes and curious fauna, seen through desperate human eyes, take on a nightmarish hostility. Geiger-esque in appearance it may be, its horror runs more Schopenhauer. The “blind incessant impulse” of the forces around you looms capable of terrible destruction. But without any visible malice behind the dim ferocity of your insectoid tormenters, there’s no adventure in defeating them. You scrape by numbly, and continue scraping lower into the bowels of an indifferent earth.
As a game, it feels like the anti Into The Breach. Its subterranean crawlies strike forms comparable to Subset’s insectoid Kaiju in the way those horrible realistic Simpsons images do for the original cartoon. They communicate in rattling snorts; awful, guttural slurping noises tinged with white static. When they’re not around, contend yourself with mechanical whirring, crackling horror strings and radio chatter not so much panicked as like transmissions from the most remote reaches of inner space.
Reader, it fucking sucks down here.
It almost mocks Into The Breach’s reliable information too, leaving you to blindly dig in the dark with gargant drills like the world’s most terrified mecha-mole, just praying the heat signal on your radar is a petroleum deposit, or the natural gas you need to combat deadly emissions rising to catastrophic levels. Instead, it’s often a fungus infested Mothra-sized flapbastard who’ll sit around menacingly for a few turns before deciding to chew the roof off your most favouritest oxygen building.
Stripped back to the maths of it all, it’s a resource balance sheet. You need oxygen to survive, power for the oxygen buildings, fuel for the drills and weaponry you’ll need to defend yourself. For power, you’ll need extract petroleum from lakes in the earth. You can’t expand too much because you’ve got a limited pool of workers, but if you play it too safe, you’ll too slowly gather the resources and technology points you’ll need to progress to a point where you can complete scenario objectives, and likely fall behind in your continuous arms race against acid snails and huge worms that feed on civilisation, drink fear, and shit natural disasters.
Having recovered the resources I need from one stage, I am trying to move my mobile base to the exit tunnel, but the putrid corpses of flatfish the size of well-funded libraries keep bubbling up to the service and erupting in clouds of miasmatic vapour. The very first screen of the game tells me that my dwindling crew are being “eaten away by ulcers”. My skin itches the entire time.
You have to keep your workers from going mad by occasionally playing soothing music from your base structure. There’s a timer restricting how long you can spend on each turn. You can switch it off but it feels like the crucial sauce here. There are certain, usually powerful abilities you can only use once a turn, and so building up a mental priority list and executing it while also factoring in any new, Acid Snail-shaped developments is where the game lies.
It can feel disconcertingly ordinary to interact with until it hits with you a new snippet of muscular, wispy prose: a huge abandoned excavator is a ‘monstrous aggregate’. Ancient despair is teased out with oblique hints and concrete modernism. You keep marking days on your calender, you’re told, despite losing any real sense of time. You can feel the weight of the earth’s layers above you but any real concept of a surface feels like a distant idea: ‘up’ only of any real consequences to let you know where down is. Do I want to play more? Not especially. Will I be thinking about it for a good while? Yes! It’s come for the vibes, stay for the vibes, essentially. Still, pretty singular as far as vibes go.
This review is based on a review copy provided by the developer