Spooky survival games Angst knows what I want: Survival mechanisms that interfere with my quest to steal the sad orb from a guy in the basement

Survival games! They're everywhere. Since the dawning of time, man has dreamed of avenging his ancestral enemy, the tree. These games bring those dreams to life--you can punch trees, sculpt their corpses in bizarre shapes, and set them on fire. There's a lot of torture being done to trees.

The game Angst, which I played this morning as part of its ongoing playtest, begins in a similar way. You wake up in the cold, you hit the trees. Then, the tutorial voice on a beaten-up ham-radio starts urging you to put food in an old chest. Normally, this would be normal, as you need to preserve food all the time in these games. But the voice makes it clear that the food doesn't belong to you.

Which hooked me. I have to admit. spooks grab my attention more than anything else. Angst was the perfect Halloween-y game to get me interested with its pitch-black night, shadowy figures on the edge of my vision, and the quest to collect the 'Orb of Sorrow.' Diablo 4 item naming team must moonlight.

It gets dark. Pitch-dark. When you're alone in the pitch-dark, with wolves and a violent rabbit, things can get a little tense. My Stalker neurons were a little sparked by the idea of descending into a basement to search for materials, or a sphere filled with sadness. I didn't mind the combat. It's a sparse mixture of whack, dodge, and block that doesn't require too much.

I was genuinely surprised that I made it through the playtest despite my dislike of survival games. The scares kept my interest, and the survival stuff was never too intrusive. You've got the hunger, sleep and temperature meters, but they didn't decrease fast enough for me to be concerned. Did I go through a few episodes of hunger? Yes. Was this a challenge that eating about 300,000 berries couldn't solve? No. I don't think it's a compliment if I say I enjoyed a survival video game because I could ignore most of the survival stuff. But that's how I felt.

I think it's going easy on me for the moment. The game is very clear in that it expects to die. Every new day, the game would chirpily inform me that I had broken my previous record for staying alive. Does this mean that the game will be harder in the future, after playtesting? Is this a game that I will almost certainly bounce off? Perhaps. But for now I had a lot of fun.

Consider me tentatively curious to see where this goes. If you're looking for something spooky and a little spooky this Halloween, then you should check out Angst's playtest.