Casualties: Unknown
by Orsoniks
Finished: XThis game is not for the squeamish or faint of heart. To quote the game's intro: "This game contains depictions of violence, self harm, and general misery".
It's in a prototyping phase right now but you can play it and it's very engaging.
You play as an artificially created species that is being grown and used as fodder on hopeless missions in an attempt to retrieve a piece of cargo lost deep within a foreign planet. You hope to be the one that will survive and complete the mission, but the chances are incredibly slim. In the game, you venture down into the earth while scavenging, crafting, and surviving in any way that you can (until you make a mistake and die horribly). You'll need to look around for food, water, equipment, shelter, and sources of light. Bad situations often spiral out into complete disaster and injuries and deaths are often very violent.
There are quite a lot of interesting ideas packed into this one game.
I really like the item play. You have 6 inventory slots: 2 arms, 3 back slots, and 1 mouth. Given that that you will want to be stockpiling tools, weapons, food, water, numerous crafting materials, medicine, and sources of light, you will constantly have to be making difficult decisions of what to keep or leave behind. Having bags and containers are essential. Each item slot has its own unique quirks. Some items can only be held in your hands, but if your hands are full, then you have to shuffle around your inventory to get out the tool that you need. You can hold an item in your mouth, but when you eat or drink, that item will automatically be dropped, so remember to pick it up. Your character may occasionally comment on your current situation, which may give you clues about your current overall health, but holding something in your mouth will render your speech incomprehensible (also, don't put a light bulb in your mouth). Your back inventory slots are particularly valuable, as those are the only ones out of the 6 that won't drop the items if you go unconscious or take a bad fall.
Casualties: Unknown features a simulated health system reminiscent of Project Zomboid, and builds on it with more tactile medical care. Individual body parts may be infected, bruised, broken, or bleeding. With your mouse cursor guiding your hand, bandages must be physically wrapped around wounds, syringes must be manually injected into your body (make sure to check the dose), dislocated bones must be hammered back into place, and glass shards must be carefully pulled out of your skin. Being dazed, drowsy, or in pain makes these activities difficult, as your hands will be shaky or slow. The tactile-ness of the game extends to other parts of the game as well. The item capsules you can open require you to slowly input a password into a number pad. You can pick the locks of boxes with your claws, but trying to force the lock open will injure you. There is something unique about trying to pick a lock with a shaky hand while being in an immense amount of pain in the hopes that the box will contain the medical supplies you need.
Surely, the game must be designed by imagining all of the ways in which your mortal body can suffer, and putting it into the game. Digging is a huge part of the game, but exerting yourself too much will make your oxygen levels lower, requiring you to take a break. Certain foods may fill you up, but also make you sick, eventually causing you to vomit. Hitting your head will make you dazed, which slows down your overall reaction speed, and particularly bad bumps may give you brain damage. Taking too much damage might make you pass out from shock, which is very bad if you are standing near the edge of a sheer cliff. You best hope that at least one of your hands remains functional, else you will be unable to provide yourself any medical care. Luckily, there is a button that allows you to switch to clumsily using your non-dominant hand just in case your dominant hand is broken. Being too depressed will make picking up and using items occasionally fail, leading you to have to repeatedly try over and over to motivate yourself to eat or care for yourself. Opioids can be used to provide pain relief, but take care so that you don't overdose or become addicted. Every bite and scratch makes you wonder about a potential infection that may or may not visibly cause you problems in the future. Broken bones take a long time to heal, but you don't have the luxury of waiting around for a fractured leg to mend.
Being thorough and careful is essential. You need to constantly be on the lookout for items that may help you and traps that will stab, snare, launch, or explode you. I didn't know there were bear traps in the game until I very much knew that there were bear traps in the game. Mistakes and injuries often compound upon each other: A bite from a monster may cause an infection, being too hot will make you thirsty, vomiting from sickness will make you hungry, a broken leg hurts to walk on, being in pain will make you sleep worse, and as the reality of your situation sets in, your mental health will suffer.
Becoming injured is an exhilarating experience. You have to stay calm and assess the situation because time is limited. Panicking will cause you to make mistakes like overlooking the medicine that you need, or putting yourself in further danger. You cannot afford to fumble around in your inventory.
I love the ways that your current health is reflected in audio and visual effects. Being too hot or too cold will tint the screen red or blue. Being sick warps the screen. Over exerting yourself makes the screen fuzzy. Being in pain makes a pulsating red vignette appear. As you get more and more injured, you become accompanied by a variety of ambient drones that you will get to know very well.
One thing that surprised me in this game is how much it revels in allowing you to suffer in a hopeless situation. Death is not slow: it is agonizingly painful and intense. The game will let you drag your broken body around for quite some time before mercifully putting you out of your misery. You get to watch as more and more of your body slowly fails, before you go unconscious for the last time. It is cruel in the way that it prolongs your misery, but also cruel in that it might give you a glimmer of false hope. Perhaps, you may think, as long as you can keep stumbling forward, you might find just the right thing that you need to fix this. This rarely happens. The slow march towards death becomes a visceral event that slowly builds in intensity and dread up until the moment that you die, similar to the way that a horror movie will gleefully let you squirm in anticipation for the event that you know is coming, but don't know when.
This is definitely a game that not everyone will be able to stomach, but I recommend checking it out if you can. This game is endlessly fascinating and I am interested to see how it develops.
Completely unrelated to all of this: one thing I like about the game is that you get to be some sort of Creature (there is a dedicated bark button). However, it does make playing the game sadder and more heartbreaking because your character makes sad dog noises as it takes damage and eventually dies.