I’ll just get it out in the open: Abiotic Factor is one of the greatest survival crafting games ever made, and by far my favorite. It’s an easy declaration to make because, unlike most games I’ve put a score on, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this one.
NEED TO KNOW
What is it A survival crafting game set during a Black Mesa-like disaster in 1993.
Release Date July 22, 2025
Expect to Pay $35/£25
Developer Deep Field Games
Publisher Playstack
Reviewed on RTX 2080 Super, Intel Core i9 9900KS, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer 1-6 players
Steam Deck Playable
Link Official site
I’ve been playing Abiotic Factor with friends for over a year. In that time, we’ve racked up 80 hours in a single save, witnessing the GATE Cascade Research Facility and its associated horrors, both interdimensional and gastrointestinal, expand in real time. Updates have proven frequent and excellent, unlocking huge sectors of the map while introducing transformative technology, mysteries, quality-of-life upgrades, and most importantly, fishing.
I’m not usually one to play games before they hit 1.0, but Abiotic Factor’s premise was too good to pass up when it first hit Steam last May: You play as scientists trapped in a secret underground facility amidst a Black Mesa-style disaster in the year 1993. That’s some potent PC gaming catnip, but the Half-Life trappings aren’t just wallpaper. Deep Field Games takes the survival framework of Valheim and Project Zomboid and fully commits to the idea of nerds with zero survival skills and male pattern baldness thwarting an interdimensional apocalyptic invasion with nothing but office equipment, PhDs, and gallons of coffee.
Work-life balance
Many of our 80+ hours in Abiotic Factor were spent tiptoing down the cold, unfeeling halls of GATE while gripping crossbows made out of meter sticks and eating potato chips pilfered from vending machines.
Abiotic Factor’s story, and the thrust of its central quest, is about escape. We’ve raided nuclear reactors, charted other dimensions, fired lasers at 30-foot monsters, and robbed a train in the name of fixing a busted elevator, but at least half of that time was also spent building and enjoying a home base.
Our home base has become my favorite place in all of videogames. The heart of it is the same little craphole we built on our very first day using just a workbench and some storage boxes in the cafeteria security office. Its slow but steady expansion is a reflection of Abiotic Factor’s fantastically long tech tree constantly feeding us weird things to build.
One day we outgrew the security office and started building in the kitchen, where my friend spent afternoons inventing portable stoves, purifying water, and preparing cursed alien burgers, soups, salad wraps, and sushi to keep our bellies filled. Then came the discovery of farmable crops from the Anteverse, which spilled operations into the outer cafeteria entryway.
Before we knew it, we’d made a barricaded fortress of increasingly dangerous inventions—laser turrets, void toilets, an alien we trapped in a tube—that doubled as a cozy museum of our adventures.
The brilliant twist of Abiotic Factor’s handcrafted corporate environments is that there are no blank canvases to work with. You’re forced to carve a comfy home out of bland spaces with pre-existing dimensions and purposes, which takes the pressure off survival players like me who typically make a boring square in Minecraft and call it a day. You’re not building a home as much as moving into an existing one, a distinction that proved creatively fulfilling for our group.
In one satellite base, we spent a whole night converting a featureless lab into a gourmet kitchen/firing range with cutting boards, ammo depots, and fridges.
It helps that Abiotic Factor’s map is overflowing with furniture, photos, knick-knacks, and decorations that we’d find on expeditions and instinctively pocket. Were it not for our tastefully curated living room decor, shelf of collectible GATE figures, and literal dozens of dog photos, our base would feel like any old workshop.
Dry mouth
Comfortable spaces aren’t just a cosmetic flourish, because Abiotic Factor has so many systems, simulations, and skills that go beyond your standard survival hunger meter. It’s the only survival game I’ve played that rewards not just surviving, but thriving. Sleeping and pooping are hands-on activities with timing minigames. Standing by a heater helps you heal quicker. Drinking coffee grants cold resistance. Even something as simple as sitting on a couch has the tangible effect of pausing fatigue buildup.
Linking normal human maintenance to the survival loop has this wonderful way of bringing the roleplay out of us. Normal conversations in Abiotic Factor include what’s for dinner, how tired we are, or planning supply runs while sitting on a couch sipping sodas. It’s the most lifelike survival game, which is surprising given the constant presence of killer security bots, cultish militias, and the “Coworker,” an NPC who walks on four legs begging for snacks.
I’m still regularly surprised to discover new buffs and debuffs triggered by specific actions. Screw up too much during the sleeping minigame? Sorry, you’re groggy (+30% fatigue).
Recently eaten some good soup? Congrats, you’re now Souper Satisfied (hunger depletes slowly for a while).
That’s all on top of a fun traits system that lets you sign up for both positive and negative bonuses at character creation. You can take more positive traits by also choosing more negative traits, which, even after 80 hours, are still informing our playstyles in ways I never expected.
My Buff Brainiac trait came in handy countless times when hauling 80 pounds of gear, but to afford it, I also took Weak Bladder, a trait that earned me a reputation for constantly needing a bathroom in the middle of expeditions. If there was a toilet around, great, but if not, well… let’s just say I earned the “Accidents Happen” achievement in record time.
Meanwhile, my friend chose Narcoleptic, a sleepy curse that plagued her for so long that she eventually started adventuring while seated in a rolling chair to stave off exhaustion. Eventually she got around it by grinding Strength until she could carry around a military cot in her backpack.
Performance review
Classes picked at character creation provide a template for how you could spec your scientist, but it’s not a prescriptive system. You slowly get better at whatever you’re doing, be it sprinting, sneaking, shooting, cooking, or shaking vending machines.
I consider it a great sign that Abiotic Factor has so many weird and intriguing combat options that all five of us ended up with different specialties: Some crafted electrified blades, others modified crowbars, mastered throwing darts, or invented a deadly disc launcher with the guts of an air compressor. I committed to ranged early on, beginning with a makeshift crossbow fitted out of meter sticks and rubber bands. I couldn’t keep my reticle steady on anything further than 10 feet for the longest time, but eventually, I became the party’s clutch sniper.
Combat itself isn’t stellar: Clubs and crowbars have an unsatisfying “bonk” that’s a bit too close to classic Half-Life, enemies are really spongy early on, there’s not a lot of damage feedback, and hit detection can be choppy if your host doesn’t have great internet.
Those are sins that’d usually get on my nerves as an FPS guy, but they never bothered me here. I was busy enjoying our wacky inventions and the tech tree that got us there. The pipe clubs and kitchen knives that carried us through the early game graduated to laser swords, goo launchers, electro-magnetic crossbows, and like 18 other mad scientist gadgets I don’t wanna spoil.
Abiotic Factor does have normal guns, by the way, but they’re deliberately limited. Ammo is hard to come by and most guns aren’t even usable until you upgrade them. That’s because—I think smartly—Deep Field wanted to emphasize designing your own way out of a problem. That’s borne out in the crafting interface, which has its own little ideation minigame where you assemble the invention from its component parts in your mind before it’s unlocked as a permanent recipe.
Offsite
When we gear up and set off to explore a new sector of GATE, Abiotic Factor morphs into a co-op Half-Life campaign. The story is linear in that you only ever have one main goal at a time, but Deep Field does a decent job of pointing you at the “what” and letting you figure out the “how.” I do wish the objectives themselves were more distinct from sector to sector—the “what” is very often some sort of machine we gotta fix by crafting some specialized tech—but we found more than enough flavor in the locations themselves to stay interested.
Finding a new building is always the most exciting part of a night, as the group fans out like a pack of dogs and pick apart every inch of it for story bits, characters to talk to, and any furniture not nailed down.
I’ll never forget the night we finally punched through the Manufacturing wing by triggering a giant explosion, or our harrowing scuba dive in the Hydroplant, or the day a single sniper in a hallway wiped out our whole party, or the time we stepped through a portal into the Anteverse, and discovered Abiotic Factor goes to way more places than just GATE itself. Peppered throughout the game are portals to alternate dimensions that expand on the lore of the Exor race and GATE’s hilariously irresponsible initiatives.
These regular excursions into the unknown are so unique for a survival game. Not only do they break up Abio’s barrage of hallways, but they also serve as a sandbox for Deep Field to play with genre. An early portal world, Flathill, is a survival horror episode about avoiding the gaze of a 20-foot-tall skeletal monster in a residential neighborhood. Another is a no-holds-barred throwdown with GATE’s militarized cleaners on a runaway train stuck in an infinite loop.
Deep Field encourages repeat trips to portal worlds by packing them with unique resources that reset every in-game week—this is the closest Abiotic Factor gets to “farming” since resources never replenish in the main facility.
To say more about the dark, twisted, and often delightful corners of GATE would spoil its biggest draw. Instead, I hope this screenshot album chronicling some of our adventures from the past year helps paint a picture:
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Abiotic Factor is a disorienting combo of a game, catching both survival diehards and those desperate for anything Half-Life-shaped in its dragnet, but its magical moments aren’t on an alien planet or in a crafting bench. It’s the gaps that are special—the quiet moments between adventures where GATE’s dreary soundscape becomes a soothing backdrop for friends discussing story theories, what soup’s ready on the stove, or where to go next.
If you can, I recommend you play this one with your best buds, and slowly. There is an unbelievable amount of stuff to do, and there’s really no rush. Its finale chapter, new to 1.0, is excellent, and with some major changes to the power curve like the Enhancement Bench, it might even be worth starting over.
I know I will in a few years, because now that it’s fully out, Abiotic Factor is a classic in the making.
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