Surviving the Abyss trades building a colony under the open sky for managing a research lab on the bottom of the ocean, where you attempt to develop cloning technology far from the prying eyes of the public.
You start with just an outpost building that projects a small circle of light around it, a crew that’s safely housed inside, alongside a fleet of submarines. Vast darkness surrounds you, hiding valuable resources, sealife, and, judging by the game’s trailer, things far more terrifying.
Before you can try your hand at cloning, you need to set up basic infrastructure. You assign submarines to recover resources from the seafloor, allowing you to build new structures. They need to be connected to a network of power lines and tunnels that grant oxygen and power.
Some of these buildings produce oxygen, light, or food. Others extract resources like coal or iron, fueling your power output or turning them into much-needed steel while potentially reducing air quality in the lab.
As I learned during my first playthrough, burdening a single network with too many polluters makes everyone breathe the same poor-quality air, which is one way you can end up killing your crew.
A diet of exclusively low-quality food then leads to malnourishment. Random events can also see the crew get injured and unable to work unless they’re treated at a hospital, one of the many buildings unlocked from the game’s multi-tiered tech tree.
You’ll eventually need to light up more of the seafloor using light towers, unveiling habitats from which you can obtain genomes vital for your cloning efforts. If you’re following the game’s tutorial-like introductory objectives, it’s also at this time when you’ll start to have difficulties fully staffing buildings.
Your cloning labs are – at least in the first hours of the game – your main workforce provider. But the quality of the genomes you can get early on isn’t particularly high, which results in failed attempts and clones with a limited lifespan.
The genomes in habitats also deplete, requiring a dedicated building to replenish, which itself needs to be staffed. Couple this with growing power and oxygen requirements, and you can find yourself in a position where expansion is next to impossible, your crew is sick, and its members aren’t exactly on great terms.
During the couple of hours that I spent with the game’s early access build, I could never nail the right balance to reliably push further into the unknown, as my cloning efforts couldn’t account for all the needs of my lab. Each retry got me slightly further, but Surviving the Abyss proved a tad too eager to make it difficult to progress at a steady pace.
Visually, the lab also feels a touch too sterile which, while appropriate given the game’s premise, results in too static a view you’re constantly faced with.
Gradually lighting up new areas of the ocean floor and seeing your network of tunnels stretch further is somewhat exciting, but I found myself missing the hustle and bustle of drones and colonists from previous games.
The third entry in the series currently has a functional foundation that’s very much reminiscent of its predecessors, but also some rough edges you’ll inevitably notice if you plan on jumping in right now.
Surviving the Abyss enters Steam Early Access today on January 17, where it plans to stay for a period of 6 to 12 months.
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