If your idea of great FPS level aesthetics is a hot mess of Black Mesa, Penumbra and Get Even – or you’re just driven wild by the sight of porcelain tiles peeling flirtatiously away from mortar – you might get on with Industria 2, which launches today. I’ve not played the first one, but I admired its parallel dimension Cold War-era Berlin. The second game introduces a new parallel dimension, summarised by developers Bleakmill as a tug-of-war between “industrial decay”, “boreal nature” and “otherworldly sprawling machine structures”. Phwoar!
You start off marooned in a chapel on the coast, and must navigate a series of eerie alleyways, elevator shafts and backrooms infested by putrid robots. The robots are addicted to petrichor, a Greek word for the aroma of fresh rain on soil, which here refers to some ghastly black gunk. It’s a narrative-heavy affair – there are other castaways you can ally with, and dropped journal entries about the robots, who are actually humans transformed by some kind of ubiquitous artificial intelligence. Don’t bother me about that stuff, though – I’m just here for the peeling wall tiles.
All that’s based on an hour or so with the demo, during which I went rifling through some wrecked warehouses in search of a door-opening McGuffin. I amassed a small arsenal of pistols, shotguns and rapidly deteriorating pipes, the latter more damaging than bullets, but it quickly became clear that even on Normal difficulty, avoiding the bots is better than bludgeoning them. You get an Alien-style motion tracker which gobbles up batteries like popcorn, and a torch which, thankfully, doesn’t appear to consume electricity at all.
As with Alien: Isolation and Frictional’s work, there’s a big emphasis on gamey operations taking place inside the world. You drag doors and drawers open with the cursor, and the crafting menu is a proper fold-out cloth workstation with holsters for your gear. Gosh, I’d love to own a bag like that. I would spend all my time rearranging its contents. Which is also why I would probably die if I were ever trapped in a parallel universe full of manky Daleks.
Image credit: Headup / Beep Japan / Rock Paper Shotgun
While the demo changes things up with some blind enemies who hunt using sound, I can’t say I’m particularly wowed by the robo-boofing and avoiding. It’s just the usual business of peeking around corners and listening for the pitter-patter of cyborg feet. The most exciting part in the demo was cranking a wheel to open a distant door, then galloping through before it slid shut, with various strung-out Terminators breathing down my neck.
Still, it’s early days, and I’m enjoying how the game’s boreal, industrial and cybernetic inspirations entwine. Catch Industria 2 on Steam today – the demo’s still live as of writing.
