Fight for survival in the deep sea? Our tester was really looking forward to Surviving the Abyss. Can the strategy game convince her?
Construction games are often synonymous with green meadows, blossoming flowers and bright sunshine: one Steam secret after the next lets you pound the prettiest medieval settlements out of the ground, each wooden house magnificently decorated, the inhabitants laughing all at once and, if at all, it gets uncomfortable at most once in winter.
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In the deep no one hears you scream
The build-up strategy game by Rocket Flair Studios sets the seabed in an atmospheric scene; apart from a few luminescent plants, your base is the only illuminated place. Because the water pressure in the depths is so high, the base crew must always stay inside the buildings, and you connect new buildings to the base via a tunnel system.
You get a few small submarines for collecting raw materials and constructing buildings, but they don”t work in the dark. As soon as your sonar has detected promising resource nodes, you can set up a floodlight near them, in the radius of which your submarines can mine what they need or construct new buildings.
However, working in the depths is dangerous, as minor and major accidents can take their toll on your already very limited crew. New people are only available shortly after the start, when you have completed the first tasks. After that, the cloning lab has to run in order to supply you with suitable personnel. You breed them with genomes obtained from various underwater species such as crabs and fish. Unfortunately, the life span of these clones is limited – of course, the system is not yet fully developed! – so you”ll have to reproduce regularly to fill all the jobs underwater.
Shortage management instead of magnificent buildings
And that”s not so easy, because if you want to have a self-sufficient base, you have to get used to a permanent condition in Surviving the Abyss: There is a lack of everything and many important buildings are extremely power- and oxygen-hungry. If you are unlucky in the cloning process a few times in a row, this can have extreme effects on your progress.
This is because there will never be enough personnel to fill all the necessary workplaces, factories and supply posts, or even to produce them in stock. If people are killed while working or exploring, this can easily set you back precious days that you urgently need to stabilise your supply. Resources near the starting base are also limited and run out far too soon.
Researching better technologies that can help you save resources, clone and recover your people also requires constantly active personnel in addition to basic supplies. Exploring your surroundings with expedition submarines tears another hole in your already paper-thin personnel and supply cover.
Here you”d better stick to game developer Al Lowe”s motto “Save often, save early” in order not to be completely at the mercy of the often quite nasty coincidence! Because exploration is necessary to discover new biomes and thus more mineable resources as well as better genome species.
Many secrets are scattered across the map in the form of wrecks, explorable caves and other interesting points. Once a biome is explored, you build an outpost, move crew members there and build a second base – and so on.
Love from Cthulhu
I could still live with the murderous coincidence, because RimWorld has increased my tolerance for constant restarts. At some point it will work out with the clones available in time, the conveniently located resource nodes, successfully completed events. I”m also used to the fact that the tutorial only rudimentarily explains what”s in store for me as a game experience in many Early Access games, at some point something like that is usually smoothed out.
Even the occasionally appearing, shadowy and unfortunately totally creepy deep-sea tentacled creatures, which smash my laboriously constructed buildings out of pure displeasure at my presence in their neighbourhood, I could somehow get over. After all, after researching the UV light upgrade, I can keep this destructive dolt away with my light towers.
Two other factors, however, make Surviving the Abyss a real teeth-grinder and currently at best an insider tip for the frustration-resistant: annoying bugs and the confusing, unhelpful user interface. The latter makes it particularly difficult for me to constantly move people between different jobs.
If I close a building to save electricity and oxygen, the game automatically distributes the freed-up workers to new, vacant jobs. But if I want to place them in a specific location, I have to scroll through the list of all workers in that building at the desired job slot and reassign the people.
By the way, I can”t sort this list by job type or labour skill – a job overview like in Endzone: A World Apart would be a real asset! Pop-up message windows informing me of problems in my base do only that and nothing beyond: If the friendly tentacle guy next door has blown up an oxygen factory, for example, I have to search all the existing ones myself and manually order a repair.
This is not a problem with a small laboratory, but it quickly becomes confusing with a base with outposts and remote raw material mining buildings. Jumping to the location of the problem by clicking on the message would really make things easier.
Power desperately wanted
Especially annoying: When buildings are actually connected to the power and oxygen grid, there is enough overproduction for the operation and workers for the jobs, but the building still does not work and indicates that there is not enough power. Only demolition and new construction will help, losing some of the already meagre resources.
Also annoying: when the building that is supposed to rebuild my marine fauna just doesn”t work, I”m not notified about it and the genome replenishment stalls! Surviving the Abyss thus shows an interesting approach, but still needs to change a few things in Early Access so that the game can really be fun in the long run.
Rocket Flair Studios wants to take six to twelve months until the final release. There is no roadmap yet, only vague promises of more content, story events and research, as well as regular balance and gameplay changes.
Preliminary Score Box
| Category | Pro and Con | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Presentation | + Buildings and menus in retro style + high zoom levels possible … – … revealing muddy building textures – not very varied colour palette – very uniform background music ? Will there be more variety and bustle? ? Will there be more ways to get rid of the darkness? ? Will the buildings become more distinguishable? |
2-4/5 |
| Game Design | + Exploration and resource mining with events. + fine-grained allocation offers challenge – confusing job allocation – cumbersome debugging/problem solving – Building use partly bugged ? Are comfort functions still built in ? ? Will there be better problem messages with tracking soon? |
2-4/5 |
| Balance | + manageable production chains + free saving – no difficulty settings – buildings have extreme power/oxygen hunger – progress (such as cloning successes) is very random ? Will bonuses available through research become stronger ? ? Will there be customisable difficulty levels at some point? |
2-4/5 |
| Story/Atmosphere | + wonderfully gloomy deep sea + interesting basic story idea + events well suited to the setting – very uniform daily routine with little scurry factor – deep sea creature attacks not scary ? Does the horror part get bigger at some point? ? What do other biomes look like? |
3-5/5 |
| Scope | + Campaign with story part + different biomes and technologies – (still?) no sandbox mode, no alternative scenarios ? How much long term motivation is there in this? ? Is there any replay value beyond wanting to get better? ? Will other scenarios/campaigns be added? |
2-4/5 |
| Valuation tendency | The good basic idea of Surviving the Abyss still needs some work before it becomes a versatile and exciting building game. | 60 to 75 |
I was actually really looking forward to Surviving the Abyss, as the demo of Aquatico, the recently launched underwater competitor, which I played at the last SteamFest, generally came across as too well-behaved and uneventful. Nasty clone experiments, horror from the depths and a hard-hitting construction sim would have been right up my alley, had it not been problematically implemented in so many places. If a game requires me to constantly juggle workers and jobs, there should at least be a clear reallocation system – the competition can do that too! The fact that I have to fight against the sometimes really nasty coincidence is much less of a problem than buggable displays, non-functioning buildings and a generally poor overview.
Even if you like it challenging, like me, like to try to build up under the most difficult conditions, bugs, poor user-friendliness and balancing problems shouldn”t slow you down even more. Because actually the setting is well chosen, the atmosphere in the gloomy depths immersive enough to want to experience more. Good thing Surviving the Abyss is only at the beginning of Early Access, as community feedback and new content will hopefully lead to a more rounded and better game over time. Then I”ll be happy to say hello again to the tentacle guy next door!
