October is the perfect time to dive into a survival game, and there are three from publishing platform indie.io that are part of Steam Next Fest from now until October 26. And these three prove that “survival game” can mean very different things and have completely different gameplay.
One is a co-op horror-comedy set in a coal mine, one is an open-world sandbox after a zombie apocalypse, and one sees you stranded alone on a 24-island archipelago after your ship mysteriously crashes. You can play all three games right now, with two of them having free demos as part of Steam Next Fest and one already fully released with a huge new content update for spooky season.
Three generations ago, the sky froze. Now, your coal mining town is perpetually covered in snow. You might think that would be the end of the mine, but nope, the state kept it open and is forcing miners to continue delving into its depths. That might sound a bit dystopian, but it’s a premise that Coal Duty mines for humor as well as coal.
It’s a co-op extraction game for between 1–5 players, and you play as a group of miners who must navigate the many dangers of the mine to survive and get out with the materials you gathered. Each run is procedurally generally, so you’ll need to work together with your teammates to figure out how to progress.
That teamwork relies on one of Coal Duty’s most interesting mechanics: proximity voice chat. You can talk to each other, but your teammates will only hear you if they’re close by. You can call out to let them know you found the correct route, warn them of dangers, or anything else you think is worth mentioning. But be wary: Everything else in the mine can also hear you if they’re close enough, and you don’t want to activate any dangers because you got chatty.
Those dangers are plentiful and varied. There are dozens of different creatures, each of which have characteristics you’ll need to figure out to learn how to effectively deal with them. Some are blind, some are fast, some will disguise themselves as coal. Nothing beats hearing your friend suddenly panic because an enemy startled them, only to attract more unwanted attention with their shrieking.
A free demo of Coal Duty is playable now during Steam Next Fest, and it’s a great time for you and your friends to give it a try. It releases in Early Access on October 27, the day after Next Fest ends. The demo is a deliberate slice of the game, while the Early Access release will add more mine floors, creatures, and an escape machine.
IGN covered HumanitZ’s 1.0 launch in February, and this isometric open-world zombie survival sandbox game just dropped its biggest update since on October 19. It introduced some major new additions: NPC recruitment, player zombification, a Halloween event, a headshot-only mode, new gear, and more.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/3-very-different-survival-games-from-indieio-featured-in-steam-next-fest
