Between the boundless choice, retro-futuristic visual style, and sly sense of humor, one thing I tend to forget when playing Fallout is just how unremittingly bleak it can be. I think this applies most to Fallout New Vegas, especially on the survival-driven hardcore mode. The sun’s bearing down. You’re subsisting on murky bottles of old water. Boone is sitting there, lamenting his awful past in the NCR – at least until a Mother Deathclaw ragdolls him in one stroke, and you’re forced to quick load. With turn-based combat reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon, and a pixel-art style and focus on survival that brings to mind Terraria, a gorgeous new Steam RPG, available right now, feels like the brutality of Bethesda and Obsidian’s classic bottled and purified.
Given the setting, Subterrain: Mines of Titan also feels akin to the opening of Starfield. On the surface, your job is to plunder a gloomy, desolate mine on the titular moon of Saturn. But something has gone horribly awry. Awakening from your stasis pod, you discover the entire operation has been overrun by bizarre, fleshy horrors that are evolving before your very eyes. A survival and RPG game, you need to find materials, craft equipment and weapons, build yourself somewhere safe to stay low, and try to remain alive.
Combat is turn-based and every action and movement advances time – at certain hours, the monsters will become more present and active, so you need to carefully manage how you spend your day. Food and water need to be scavenged and rationed, and you can assign duties to other surviving miners in an attempt to create an ad-hoc settlement and society.
With crunchy pixel-art visuals, gory, fleshy monsters, and a focus on resources and stats-driven battles, at its best, Subterrain feels like a spiritual revival of the classic Fallout games, as you navigate decaying, forsaken old corporate institutions to try and find what you need to live. If you want to try it out, it’s available on Steam right here.
Alternatively, you might want some of the other best survival games, or maybe some other great games like Fallout that you can find on PC.
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