There’s no light. The shuttle that brought me into the depths is fitted with just a shower, and the darkness swallows everything around me. Each step is as painful as the last, like walking barefoot on LEGO bricks, as I narrowly miss traps. Corpses are frozen as I head further down, a reminder of who came before and likely what I’ll end up as. I crack the glass of a small base, crawling through to gain access, shrapnel filling my foot as I sneak through. Infection rises, but with no medicine, it spreads. It gets worse. It gets worse. I die.
That was my first run of Casualties: Unknown. I’ve played a lot of survival games, but few are as brutal, as dark, and as thrilling as this Steam game, which has earned the ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ badge of approval from almost 2,000 reviews, giving it a 97% rating and making it an indie gem. It’s easy to look at its various mechanics and think it sounds challenging, masochistic, and downright terrifying, and those are all accurate. It’s also a game about hope and getting through the hardest times, pushing yourself to become stronger and better.
Let me explain: Casualties sees you play as an ‘Experiment’, the affectionate name given to creatures spliced with human and animal DNA. On an alien planet, your job is to push further into the depths, scavenging alien flora and fauna to craft resources and eventually getting deeper and deeper. However, what makes Casualties so hard is that it has a fully simulated injury and cardiovascular system; one wrong move could leave you dealing with an open wound and nothing to patch it up with.
