Abiotic Factor Review – Push Beyond The Unknown

Abiotic Factor is a survival crafting game set in the GATE Cascade Facility. In this world, you are a scientist who is pushing the limits of human knowledge and the understanding of our world and worlds beyond it. You can think of this world as being a kind of SCP-like world that pulls inspiration from SCP, Control, and the Backrooms. 

Before we dive into this review, I need to get this out of the way: Abiotic Factor has changed my perception of survival crafting games and is currently my favorite game of the year. I played a large chunk of this game with a friend, and we had a blast. It is not without its faults, bugs, and balance issues, but that hasn’t stopped me from putting over 125 hours in over a couple of weeks. This is a spoiler-heavy review!

Base Building and Customization

I love building in this game because it is so different from nearly everything else in this genre. Instead of constructing buildings (though you can still do that in some respect by using cubical doors), you have to make the facility your home. You do this by picking a spot and trying to create defenses for that position. For this playthrough, we decided to stay in the starting area because I am a hoarder, and this has a ton of room, but there are so many different places to build. 

Electricity never becomes an issue either, despite it turning off at night. All you need is one power strip, and boom, you can keep nearly everything you have going. Batteries come in different sizes, too, and some are stronger than others: The game does not give you direct numbers on their strength, but you can tell the difference between them by watching them.

You can carry paintings, arcade machines, and other types of decorations to make your base feel like home. There is a natural progression to the upgrades, too, which I like, but they don’t always feel great to craft. Some items require too many resources to craft. 

Crafting in general is hit or miss. You can’t backtrack through recipes easily, but crafting itself is a breeze once you have the right upgrades to your crafting bench. Keeping everything in one area makes crafting take a matter of seconds, which I appreciate. However, the game has a significant issue with farming certain resources. I’ll use Night Essence as an example here: The best way to get it is by farming the Reaper, and since he has a built-in timer, I was only getting about 3 Night Essence per 10-minute trip when I got him to spawn. Kevlar was also an issue until the last section of the game, but gathering that resource while playing with a group is far too much of a grind. 

Base defense quickly became my favorite part of the late game. As you travel, your base will be attacked by a variety of enemies. You can put up barricades and turrets to fight against them, and I love it. I adore watching the defenses work while I sip coffee and eat a cupcake. I just wish that there were more defenses to utilize in general. An option or an endgame device to make the attacks harder would also be amazing. I love defending my loot, and I am beyond joyful that this game has base attacks.

A Facility Brought to Life

Abiotic Factor features 7 main sections that you’ll be adventuring through. Before talking about them in more detail, I have to bring up how impressed I am by their designs. While some are more fun than others to travel through, I am simply awe-inspired by the way everything connects and feels cohesive. Each location not only feels like it belongs to the facility, but you can look around and tell exactly what each area was used for. Everything down to where the lore terminals are is simply brilliant. 

The Office Sector is the first area, and this is where you’ll get used to how the game functions. Core enemies like the Pest, Security Robot, and Peccary are found here. This area also evolves throughout your playthrough, with enemies from other areas making a comeback to ruin your day. I love this area, which is why my base is always here. Every area in the game eventually connects back to this sector, too! Navigating it without getting lost was extremely easy for me because of how well the signs in this game are placed. With loot respawning turned on, the place constantly feels thematically appropriate. 

Manufacturing West is where the seriousness of the situation, depending on whether you read the lore or not, really comes into play. This area is alright. To me, it’s nothing special, but it’s still fun to traverse through. The area itself is huge! As you raise your Clearance Level, more of Manufacturing opens up to you. You also meet The Order here: These guys will come up a lot and quickly become one of the most common enemies in the game, so be ready to fight them often. We also see a few doors to Manufacturing East, an area that is not in the game, but for lore purposes, I did try to break these doors down. Manufacturing West is also how you get to one of my favorite Portal Worlds, which I talk about in the next section. You’ll meet many important characters here, namely Frank. On that note, be sure to look around after you find people for the first time because they often move! Some will be found still alive while others…not so much. 

Cascade Laboratories is the best area in the game at the time of writing this review, and no one will ever change my mind. Here you’ll find a very special, glitchy enemy who gave me nothing but grief until I trapped her. This is where you also get to meet all of the contained items, and wow! I can not stress enough how much I wish this game were about the anomalous objects because the team behind Abiotic Factor did an excellent job not only creating these objects but also writing the lore for them. Everything is made with so much love and care, and the vision for the game comes to life here. Cascade Laboratories is what made me fall in love with this game and is the reason I play daily. New enemies are found here, and while I won’t go over them all, the new robot was a mega pain until I figured out the best way to maneuver it and take it down. Wandering the hallways of the laboratories makes me happy in a way that is hard to describe, but the feeling of being one of the last scientists standing is perfectly captured here. Finding the hallway that leads to the Space Queen, where zombies slowly come at you, was a particularly memorable moment. It was a stark contrast from what the rest of the game was, and made me tense up with confusion. Finding the Antigravity Cube is still one of my favorite moments in the whole game; my friend got a kick out of me trying to figure it out for the first time.

The Security Sector is one of the weakest areas in the game. From the very beginning, you have characters talking about how dangerous the area is, and once you get there, you find an area filled with pitch darkness. I loved it. It genuinely felt creepy, and then BOOM, the Reaper, another monster you can’t kill, but can wound, appears. I still remember my reaction when I first saw him get hurt by a laser. He will eventually take you to the Night Realm, which was cool the first two times, and after that, it made me roll my eyes. The drops from this area are limited, so make sure you have loot respawning on; it doesn’t turn off your achievements, at least at the time of writing this review. I find navigating the Reaper to be tedious and honestly wish there was a way to get the power working or something. I didn’t even like searching for lore because I didn’t want to navigate around him anymore. 

Hydroplant is up next, and to me, this is where the game starts to waver a little. The design of the area is wicked cool, and going through the area is easy enough once you take out the snipers, but the difficulty spike here feels poorly managed. For starters, the snipers cause bleed way too much. I was getting it every time I was shot, which I fixed by upgrading my armor. The next issue was the robots that shoot grenades at you: They take a while to go down, depending on what you’re using for a weapon. I could deal with that if they didn’t have an insane aggro range. You could be fighting the first one you meet, and suddenly, the one on the bridge wants you dead for no good reason. One funny part of the Hydroplant is the waterfall apartments. It’s an area that was so unlike an apartment complex that my friend didn’t realize that we had already seen it. It was a major design misstep. I will give this area a huge high five, though, for making me realize I am completely afraid of deep water, even in games. The underwater section is one of the most awkward sections in the game. As I started to get used to the water, my fear turned into complete frustration because of the low visibility. 

Reactors are where I nearly rage-quit the game. Gatekeepers are introduced here, and while they’re cool, they are just more humans. But wait! These are special because they do magic and, for some reason, are more spongy than they ever needed to be. The enemy design is top-notch, but from the way they were presented in the lore, I was expecting something a little different. In small groups, most of them are fine enough to fight and can be very fun. The issue comes when you surround them with other enemies. The first reactor was fine enough to get to and go through. You meet a few more new enemies, travel through an alright area, and you’re done. The rest of them, though, are built like mazes, completely filled with enemies, and at one point, I had to question my sanity completely to fight waves of them off. I beat this section using a full set of stealth armor and lots of traps. Actually, this is how I got through the Portal World in this area, too. I would’ve done the same with Residences, but that area is far too cold for that. 

The Residence Sector is the last one, and for me, it’s a hit or miss. I don’t see how the staff could’ve slept here, considering there are only a few rooms. I wish we had gotten a lot more in the way of living quarters. A new enemy is introduced here, and it’s one of the coolest ones in the game. You’ll also get to meet Bigfoot, which I found to be very interesting, especially since there is more than one. Residences had a major cold storm blow in, and it kind of takes some of the more interesting aspects of the sector away. It is also one of the smallest areas in the game, but I wasn’t too upset because of all of the lore you get here. An NPC dies here, which made the community a little upset, but I found it fitting. I won’t spoil it here, but the death made complete sense in the context of the game. Part of Residences is an area called Fragments, and it is one of the most gorgeous areas in the whole game. 

As you go through Residences, you’ll have to access the Dark Lens, an object you learn about in the labs and through lore. I loved navigating through this area for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it’s a reminder of how dire the situation really is. It also showcases a beautiful display of shops and restaurants, which are spaced out nicely. You have to fight more Gatekeepers here. I took them out with mugnates and spite. But this area encapsulates what drew me to this game in the first place, which is the weirdness. It feels like you’re two steps from the end of the world here, and I love it.

Portal Worlds

I am not joking when I say that these are the best parts of this game. I would buy Portal World DLC by the hundreds, support any expansion to existing Portal Worlds, and honestly, I would clean the office of Deep Field Games for more Portal Worlds. Portal Worlds and the anomalous objects are so damn cool. I won’t talk about every world here because this review would turn into a dissertation, but there are a few I want to cover.

When you get to Flathill, it becomes apparent that the developers knew exactly what they wanted from this world, and they brought it to life in a way that still makes me grin when I go and revisit the world. Flathill is what happens when science is taken to the extreme. I won’t go over the full story here, but the environmental storytelling in this area is off the charts. What you see in the image above is a Composer, as the scientists take to calling them. I adore them with every fiber of my being and was extremely sad to see we locked one up in a cell that is far too small for containment. I like Flathill because it feels like a fully realized slice of the world and an important chunk of a much bigger story. There is supposedly another enemy here, but I still haven’t encountered it. You will be coming back here often because it is a great source of loot, so it’s best to get acquainted with the area. After you finish Portal Worlds, you can use the jump pack, so traversal is a breeze. I also need to give credit to the amazing box design of this area. What I mean by that is there is a very natural flow to Flathill that will prevent you from getting too lost. 

The next Portal World I need to give credit to is The Train for a few reasons. One, it’s easy to navigate and fast to loot for your loot runs. The atmosphere of the train is best described as a sort of beautiful desolation, which is how I would describe the majority of this game. The Train is interesting because it is the first instance where you get The Order not really understanding what they’re messing with, if you listen to the dialogue. The Train also introduces a few items that are good for breaking down and using to build other items. Interestingly enough, though, I didn’t find a use for the pocket watch aside from scrapping it down. 

Space Queen is one of the best Portal Worlds in the game. You’re essentially sucked into an arcade machine; the science is explained in the lore. This area is a living slice of an arcade game, which needs to be expanded on in future updates because I am obsessed with it. This one involves a lot of platforming as you gather coins and crowns to complete the world. There are a few cosmetics and a rather simple slice of story to dive into. What drew me into this Portal World was how well the developers did at making this arcade game feel separate from the base game. 

Combat

Combat is alright, it didn’t blow me away, but it didn’t make me want to quit the game either. There are a couple of issues that I will point out here before diving into the positive. Sharp Melee is king, and the game feels like it pushes you into that direction. These weapons get the best/coolest upgrades and, in general, will hit the strongest too unless you get the charge attack for blunt melee damage. As soon as I unlocked the Laser Katana, I didn’t bother with any of the other melee weapons, like the spears. There is also an issue with weapon balance. 

The Deatomizer is the best gun in the game from the moment you get it until the very end. Yes, you can upgrade many of the ranged weapons, even the military guns, but I didn’t bother with that until after I beat the game, just to test them out. The trade-off to using this gun is that you have to charge it using lasers, but that is remedied by using one or many Laser Collectors. Two Laser Collectors got me through the end boss fight and carried me through the last few sections of the game. 

Guns, especially military guns, are not well-balanced, even with the upgrades. You can use a sniper, an SMG, a pistol, and a shotgun. You can craft a scrapshot shotgun and pistol as well, and there is another shotgun that you can find later in the game. The shotgun that you get later from a location that I won’t spoil is my favorite weapon in the game, just because of its backstory and design. However, these weapons have a pretty significant falloff once you reach the Hydroplant, and it gets worse as you continue through the rest of the game. It feels as though the game wants you to use the more science-based weapons, which are extremely fun but feel like a mismatch for how the game is formatted. 

As Abiotic Factor progresses, you go from fighting “aliens” to fighting more and more humans. Each one of these tends to use ranged weaponry, and while you can take out a good bit with melee weapons with ease, the game feels like it wants you to be using more ranged weapons towards the end, and you don’t get a choice at the end of the game, which I talk about in the Story section of this review. 

With all of that being said, I still enjoy the game’s combat. Stealth is a particularly enjoyable element, especially once you get the stealth-specific armor. One-hitting enemies is addictive and became the sole reason that I was still carrying my pickaxe around. Throwing weapons are not always the strongest, but still provide the same level of enjoyment. 

Story

This section contains major story spoilers.

Your story starts with a ride through the outback and right to the GATE Cascade Facility. During your first few hours, you get your GATEPAL, a device that stores important data and communications. Here, you learn that you came from the Springer Facility. You also learn that all of the staff must be familiar with ECP (Emergency Containment Protocols). At GATE, you’re not just doing any ordinary science; you’re working with a large range of specimens and entities. 

One of the game’s core mechanics is introduced early on: The power goes off at night, and you need to find a way to work around that. You can use batteries, power strips, and more to make sure your defences are constantly on and you can work through the night. 

As you push forward and unlock lore, you learn that one of the head scientists and a couple of the lower-level scientists believe someone has been monitoring them and stealing their data. This is true, and unfortunately, GATE Cascade was not equipped to deal with the breach. You quickly learn that Grayson, a wounded forklift operator, has seen something. There is military in the facility, but not Gatekeepers or the normal army. 

It becomes clear that you have to escape, and your first escape attempt is through the Manufacturing zone. This introduces the concept of the keypad hackers, something that you’ll be upgrading even as far as the last leg of the game. All of the escape attempts fail one after the other until you make your way to the Containment Sector. Here we meet Dr. Cahn, and this is where the story starts to irritate me. It is so clear by the second time that you meet this character that he is not human, and as you play the game, more audio logs confirm that he is malicious or, at the very least, that he did something to spook people. You don’t have a choice, though; you have to let him out if you want to continue the game. This is fine, I understand that the story must go on. Your escape attempt in this area fails, too, and it’s onto the next. 

Eventually, you have to turn on four nuclear reactors for your next escape attempt. This is after going to the Hydroplant and exploring Security, and the means of escape are getting more and more convoluted. The colorful cast of characters helps to break up the tension. My favorite characters are Abe and Janet, even after an incident that happened in the Residence area. 

The Reactors are my least favorite part of the game by a mile. The difficulty spike here was intense, and a big part of the reason is because of the health, damage output, and number of enemies that the game throws at you here. I touch on this more in a different section below. But after you finish with the Reactors, you have to do a couple of Portal Worlds. I love these. They’re the best part of the game. You’ll be going through Shadowgate and the Praetorium. Portal Worlds are other realities, worlds, our world at a different point in time, or a GATE Facility. I could’ve miffed this definition, but you get the gist! You’ll be traveling quite a bit. There are 20 of these worlds to discover, and some of them can be missed, so keep your eyes open.

Once you get to Shadowgate, you will eventually find Dr. Cahn in two spots. In the second spot, he tells you that the Gatekeepers have gone mad, and as scientists, we have to send the beast that they’re experimenting on back to wherever it came from. I didn’t buy this for a second, but you have to do it. Throughout this whole section, I stealthed it to completion. 

After that, we find ourselves at the Praetorium, a gorgeous location where The Order is located. There, you meet Hasta Tria a second time, and he tells you to get the Sun Disk so you can go to the Residence Sector. Now you can venture forth and find what he wanted you to find in the first place, the Dark Lens. Something that we learned about as soon as we entered the labs, and something that is spoken about in much of the lore. 

Reaching the Residence Sector is easy enough; gear up for the cold and venture forth. This is the dullest area in the game. There are barely new enemies or items to get for more unlocks. Regardless, this is where you encounter Bigfoot and my personal favorite, Krasue, a variant of the ugly Leyak.

The Residence Sector has some interesting information, though. For starters, we learn from Dr. Rigged that we can’t let the Gatekeepers leave with the Dark Lens because it could put the rest of the world in danger. But our interfering with the Gatekeepers makes everything so much worse. Once you’re done with this sector, it’s time to end the game. 

Albatross is just something else. I love the beautiful desolation of this location, how simple it is, and how big it is. Here we meet Dr. Cahn and Dr. Thule again, and through a long conversation, we learn that Dr. Cahn is not human. The note in the journal is snarky about this, and honestly, this was the absolute worst. Everything worth knowing about Dr. Cahn is thrown at us at the end of the game. The e-mails and audio entries about The Shapeshifter, as Dr. Cahn will come to be called, are a nice touch, and a few of them are actually pretty creepy, which I appreciate. 

The issue I have with all of this is that it feels extremely rushed, like we have hit what was supposed to be the end of a long prologue, but is the end of the game. Because I called the twist so early, this whole moment left a sour taste in my mouth. However, I will say that the lore implications were fantastic to ponder. We were supposed to meet Dr. Cahn for the rest of our orientation. I have a few theories about what happened. Either we take a 2-3 year elevator ride at the start of the game, The Shapeshifter takes different forms and was somehow able to muck up some paperwork, or he had everything planned from the start. Anyway, after this conversation, we use the Sun Disk to touch a pedestal, and the worst boss fight I have experienced all year starts.

This guy is the Wayseeker, and while he looks cool, this whole fight is extremely dull. During your time in Abiotic Factor, you’re always presented with the choice of fighting with melee weapons, ranged weapons, or bombs. You can’t melee this boss. I tried and could never stay in the air long enough, and when I managed to get close, the jet pack wasn’t fast enough to do that and avoid the eye beams. 

You’re left having to use ranged weapons. My first attempt at this, I used up all of the ammo I had for every military weapon in the game and barely made a dent. I made it to phase 3 before realizing I had to go back and get something to hit this beast with, so I came back with a crossbow, flamethrower, and the Deatomizer, which is still the best long-range weapon at this point. I also made 22 mugnades and got right to business. 

Now, while this boss fight is going on, you’ll have help from a couple of the NPCs, and by this point, I am more than annoyed. Yes, they’re shooting and healing you, but you can’t take a second to appreciate what’s going on because of the never-ending tentacles and eye beam attacks. 

The boss does not react well to being hit either, so you have to guess if you’re actually hitting it, or keep an eye out for the little bits of purple blood that will briefly appear when you hit the creature. In short, I managed to kill it using the secondary fire on the Deatomizer in just a few minutes. After the fight is over, you go and talk to anyone in the area who makes sure to let you know how stupid it was to trust The Shapeshifter. After that, the Shapeshifter thanks you for helping him, calls you stupid, drops an amazing quote, and disappears. Just poof. It doesn’t feel like the actual ending of the game, and it was such a disappointment that I had to walk away for a while. 

Bugs and Glitches 

During my time with Abiotic Factor, we ran into a plethora of bugs and glitches that made me want to scream. The Leyak was a constant source of frustration for me, as she killed me underwater at least twice. We went through a whole section of the game where she would respawn every two to three minutes and kill me because I could never see her in time. 

During one occasion, I got knocked into the map; luckily, I had a teleporter because the unstuck button wasn’t working. On another occasion, I got stuck between an elevator and the floor, causing me to have to restart the game completely. When I swapped back to single player from multiplayer, the Reaper stopped spawning completely. 

The Homeworld DLC will not work on the offline game mode at all, which I find weird because on console, I can’t access the online option without PlayStation Plus. My subscription was still going at this point, so I hopped online to visit the world, and all of my stuff was gone. The worst of the bugs, though, comes from the PlayStation 5 save error bug that has caused me to lose hours upon hours of progress. My friend and I were able to mitigate this by saving every 10 minutes and turning cloud saves off so I could trigger it manually.

Final Thoughts 

Abiotic Factor feels like the SCP game I have always wanted. The Portal Worlds are amazing, and while they don’t all feel like they have the same love, they all tell a story and feel part of a living world. That is the best part of this game; it feels like you’re playing in a world that has a before and an after. 

I also appreciate that there is a little something for everyone. The cooking feels fully realized, except for the fact that you can toss random items into a bowl of soup that you can’t drag back out. It took me a while to get into cooking. I let my friend do it, and she made it look so fun that I had to give it a try. Farming is okay, too, once you get the upgraded plots. I love how water progression works. Eventually, you’ll be pulling water right out of the air around you to fill your containers. Construction is also amazing, but I am biased. I didn’t need to build grand structures, but I loved using creative building solutions for problems. 

I wish the objects and creatures from Portal Worlds were more abundant. Eventually, the game feels like it has too many human enemies in it, but that didn’t completely take away from the fun. The story was a huge letdown for me, but the lore and environmental storytelling were enough to keep me mostly satisfied in the information department. All-in-all, Abiotic Factor feels like a one-of-a-kind survival experience that I will keep coming back to for every update, no matter how small. 

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