Abiotic Factor

You work at the GATE Cascade Research Facility. Something went very wrong in the anomaly labs, the facility is sealed, and the staff who survived are now living in the break rooms and armouries of an underground complex full of interdimensional wildlife.

It is a co-op survival crafting game built entirely out of office and laboratory junk. Your first weapon is a chair leg. Your first base is a barricaded canteen. Your character is a scientist with a specialisation, not a soldier, and the game is extremely funny about that.

• Survival needs are real but gentle: hunger, thirst, fatigue, and a sanity-adjacent stress system.
• Crafting is improvisational. Everything is built from things a research facility would plausibly contain.
• The facility is divided into sectors, each a distinct area with its own hazards and its own tech.
• Character creation picks a job and a trait, which changes your bonuses and your starting knowledge.

1. 1

   Grab everything that is not bolted down

   Chairs, keyboards, mops, tape, batteries. Every item is a crafting component and the early game is a scavenging hunt.

2. 2

   Set up in a defensible room with power

   You want a workbench, a bed, storage, and ideally a door you can close. The canteen area is the classic first base.

3. 3

   Solve food and water

   Vending machines, the kitchen, and eventually a filtration setup. Bad water makes you ill, which is a real status effect.

4. 4

   Build a weapon and armour from junk

   A sharpened chair leg and a lab coat with taped-on plating will get you through the first sector.

5. 5

   Learn to sneak past, not fight through

   You are a scientist. Many encounters are survivable only by avoiding them, and that is intended.

6. 6

   Push into the next sector when you have gear

   Progress is spatial: each sector is gated by hazard, equipment and keycards rather than by levels.

• Power. Wiring generators and extension leads to run your base machines is a real puzzle, and lighting matters.
• Cooking. Real recipes from vending machine junk, with buffs worth planning around.
• Anomalies and portals. Later sectors involve interdimensional travel, and what comes back through is not always you.
• Base defence. Enemies will find your base, so barricades and turrets built from lab equipment matter.
• Research and tech tiers. You start with a stapler and end with things that should not exist.

The setting is a loving pastiche of late-90s science fiction: a huge underground government facility, a catastrophic experiment, portals to somewhere unpleasant, and a soldier response that treats surviving staff as a containment problem.

• Terminals, memos and posters carry the story, and they are written with real comic timing.
• The creatures are interdimensional rather than mutated, and their behaviour has an ecology to it.
• The security response is a threat in its own right, and the facility's management is not on your side.
• It wears its Half-Life influence openly and earns it rather than coasting on it.

• Up to six players, and the game is designed around a team of specialists rather than a lone survivor.
• Split by job: someone cooks, someone builds power, someone scouts, someone fights.
• Base building is shared and persistent, so agree on a home sector.
• Progression is per world, so a friend joining a run in progress inherits the sectors you have opened.

• Hoard tape, batteries and scrap. All three gate everything.
• Keep your base near a water source and a power outlet.
• Fight in doorways, not open labs.
• Cook. Buffed food is the cheapest advantage in the game.
• Read the terminals, both for lore and for codes you will need later.
• Take a light everywhere. Several sectors are dark in ways that are mechanically dangerous.

• The Steam page and the developer's update posts for what each sector patch added.
• The community wiki for recipe lists and sector maps.
• Ask in our Discord. Six-player runs of this are consistently one of the best co-op nights available.