Somewhere, in the cloisters of Vostok Games, we are told that co-operative story-driven missions and an online survival gametype with large free-roaming levels are still being forged - tantalising promises given the team’s heritage with the unsurpassably atmospheric STALKER series. All the same, after this brief encounter, I am left wondering: how much less unfinished is this since Jim looked at it a year ago? But, being supported by a somewhat unalluring muddle of microtransactable trousers and gasmasks, neither has it cost me a penny. Alas, after a handful of hours, the game data corrupts and subsequent attempts at reinstallation are consistently halted by a recursive nightmare of error messages which can only be broken by pouring a half-pint of lamb’s blood onto my keyboard and calling forth the hissing spirit of Task Manager to devour the process in question.
It’s to Survarium’s credit that I want to play a lot more of it.
This week’s precious artifact is free-to-play online shooter Survarium, in which the remnants of humanity tussle over abandoned radar stations and chemical plants, long reclaimed by nature (and other, less natural phenomena). Each week, Marsh Davies stalks through the reality-warping anomaly of Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or gets turned inside out by a pocket of non-euclidean space.