GamesSurvival & CraftingSpooky survival game Angst knows just I want: Survival mechanics that get out the way of my quest to steal a sad orb from the guy in the basementWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesSurvival & CraftingSpooky survival game Angst knows just I want: Survival mechanics that get out the way of my quest to steal a sad orb from the guy in the basementWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Cherrypick Games)
Survival games! They’re all the rage. Since the dawn of time, mankind has dreamt of exacting vengeance on its hated ancestral enemy: the tree. These games make those dreams reality—you punch trees, fashion their corpses into bizarre shapes, set them alight. Generally just a lot of tree torture going on.
Angst, whose ongoing playtest I spent a while mucking around in this morning, starts out much the same way. You wake up, it’s cold, hit the trees, you know the drill. But things start getting weird when the tutorial voice on your banged-up ham radio starts imploring you to stick food in an old wooden chest. That would, ordinarily, be quite normal—you need to preserve food in these games all the time—but the voice makes clear that the food isn’t for you.
(Image credit: Cherrypick Games)
Which hooked me, I’ve gotta admit. Although survival mechanics generally rub me the wrong way,spooksget my attention like nothing else, and Angst caught me in precisely the correct Halloween-y mood to pique my interest with its pitch-black nights, shadowy figures at the edge of vision, and a quest to collect an ‘Orb of Sorrow’. Diablo 4’s item-naming team must be moonlighting.
So I found myself genuinely surprised when, as an inveterate survival game disliker, I actually made it to the end of the playtest. The scares kept me interested, and to be honest, the survival stuff never gottoointrusive. Yeah, you’ve got hunger, sleep, and temperature metres, but they never really decreased fast enough to bother me. Did I start starving a couple of times? Yes. Was this a problem eating roughly 300,000 berries could not solve? No. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a compliment to a survival game to say that I enjoyed it because I could mostly ignore a lot of the survival game stuff, but it’s certainly how I felt.
(Image credit: Cherrypick Games)
I suspect it might be going easy on me, at least for now. The game makes it very clear that it expects you to die, and every new day started with the game chirpily informing me that I’d broken my previous staying alive record. Does this foretell a harder game in a post-playtest future? One I will almost definitely bounce off of? Perhaps. But for now, I had fun.
So consider me tentatively interested to see where this one goes. And if you’re on the hunt for something spooky to dip a toe in this Halloween, you could do worse than checking out Angst’s playtest.
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