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.
Which hooked me, I’ve gotta admit. Although survival mechanics generally rub me the wrong way, spooks get 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.
No, really, it gets dark. Pitch-dark. And when it’s just you in the stygian night surrounded by the hungry eyes of wolves (also, at one point, a particularly violent rabbit; I’m not sure what was going on there), things do genuinely get quite tense as you try to grope your way back to the nearest safehouse. Descending into a basement in search of materials—or a sphere of sadness—even sparked my Stalker neurons a little. I didn’t even mind the combat, a sparse mix of whack, block ‘n’ dodge that doesn’t ask too much from you.
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 got too intrusive. 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.
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.
