'I'm not a big fan of survival games,' says director of 2024's best survival game

My last few weeks with Abiotic Factor have been a cure for survival crafting burnout. I thought I'd never want to look at another crafting bench again, but it turns out, all I really needed was a genuinely fresh perspective on survival crafting to get on board. What first drew me in was Abiotic's setting, a post-disaster underground lab inspired by Half-Life's Black Mesa facility.

We didn't want to have a lot of meters, we wanted to have feelings.

You won't find choppable trees in the cold...