My un-lonely jaunt through singleplayer extraction shooters

Cargo Hunters is a dead game, although not in the way someone itching to jig in the ashes of another Concord might use the term. No gleeful sloptubers have thrust the Black Spot into its hands by declaring it cooked in a needling video thumbnail, nor paraded dismal Steam charts as cheerfully as if those charts showed falling rates of leprosy. 

But it is dead. An extinction event has left behind the furnishings of a game world designed for humans to share silly, bright little stories spun from emergent scrapes, but I will never meet another human for as long as I play. 

This is fine and good. Cargo Hunters was born dead. Or, it might be better to say that Cargo Hunters is playing dead, its population of robots with human names mimicking disconnection from a server that was never there to begin with. You load in. You saunter-sneak towards objectives. You unload precious ammunition. You try to avoid fire but take some anyway. You realise you've overreached and run to the extraction point as fast as you can on two exploded legs. Alerted enemies screech and whirr like dial-up modems protesting their own obsolescence. Post-excursion results screens tot up your hauls and discoveries and process the results into experiential data. Your robot learns a little more about a world that no longer exists. 

I love the robot's human names. The fiction of a thriving playerbase. The sense that this is just how these curious clankers, who've scavenged through the detritus of human civilisation so long they've begun to imitate us, would act. They've got the broad strokes down but haven't grasped how uncanny it feels for me, the last and therefore most important real human in the world, to be shot and robbed by Derek Hanson or Caitlyn Crane but never NapoleonBonerFart or AlphaKillaSniperVaderGamer. You get the sense they're doing it for your benefit - an act of awkward, rusty decorum, like a curtsy accompanied by the sound of creaking mechanical knees. 

Some of the robots wear beanies. If you want, you can scavenge the beanies from their remains and place them on your fat metal head. The beanie is useless and takes up a slot you could use for a protective helmet, but maybe you want Derek Hanson to think you look nice. The first beanie I find is orange, which is scientifically the Most Gamer Colour that isn't also part of the blue-green-purple loot triad. 

Cargo Hunters has those, too. During my fourth excursion I find a green-tier boxed copy of a Monopoly ripoffoly named 'Lowpoly' inside a locker. It's takes up all four slots in my backpack and is worth an eye-watering pile of credits. It's the only board game I've found so far. I assume these cupboards are showing me Lowpoly specifically among other trash because my robot sees it as a vital artefact, in the same way that there is no time to ponder a two-year-old can of chickpeas while retrieving ketchup on a tight lunchbreak. I stop to imagine the robots finding a dusty abacus and displaying it in an ad-hoc anthropology museum, then someone starts trying to snipe me from the other side of the warehouse. 

I want to say something meaningful about how freeing it is to exist in this place alone. I want to say that introducing an unpredictable human presence would put the lie to this world, as if no-one has ever been immersed in a D&D campaign before. I want to say something about "fiction-shattering teabags" (I think we're meant to call them 'tactical crouches' these days, Jeremy). 

Truthfully, I've just been avoiding extraction shooters because my performance anxiety means that playing with online strangers is rarely fun for me. The first time I joined a dungeon party in Final Fantasy 14, someone in chat asked me why I wasn't doing a specific chain of, I assume, optimal attacks in a specific order. Vivi didn't ask me that. Tifa would never. I think I was about eleven when I began to force myself to swing my arms in rhythm to my footsteps as I walked to and from school, prompted by a mate that said I looked like a robot. It comes naturally now, but I don't want to spend my time playing games worried that someone else is judging me for flubbing something as basic as movement. 

But I've still wanted to play extraction shooters, because they seemed to live in the cross-section between so many things I love in games. Meaningful deaths. Resource scarcity. Static worlds magicked into a state of fluid potency through tension and adversity - a rumble pack for the ancient part of your brain that remembers sharing fireside stories about sprinting away from giant bees with an armful of honeycomb. Games are still not great at getting you up or down a tree, but a certain type of game is bloody exceptional at throwing rocks. Extraction shooters are our cultural moment's champion of storified rock lobbing. "That could be me!" I pined. "I could be getting rocks thrown at my face". 

In Cargo Hunters, the way you take damage is similar to a mech from Battletech. A paper doll of your robot sits in the bottom left corner of the screen, divided into limbs, a torso, and a head. Each part starts orange, then red, then turns black when destroyed. A stray hit to a destroyed chest or head can kill you instantly. 

You can use repair kits to shore up the damage, but you can also use a circular saw to remove the limbs from downed enemies and swap them with your own. It is mildly upsetting to me that I will never get to stride toward another player while wearing the arms and legs of his Sunday afternoon session Discord mates. But if doing that in Cargo Hunters was possible, I wouldn't have allowed myself the opportunity to even imagine it. 

Witchfire is Destiny with a cut ethernet cable and a coffee table full of artbooks by Goya instead of Christopher Foss. It's as close as I can to get to the murky, gothic splendour of Hunt: Showdown alone. It's free of lobbies and real money currencies and emotes and skins and the first level is a shipwreck-blotted coastline and yet I do not believe it will ever release a themed event tie-in with, say, Muppet Treasure Island. Despite the isolation of it all, it buzzes with some of the same noisy vitality that makes these things a tolerable trade-off in games that do have them. 

Witchfire's mysteries are layered; its atmosphere grave and psalmic. Witchfire could replace both 'i's with 'y's and no-one would blink - that's the vybe. But it also shouts at you in red letters if you prepare to depart on an excursion without first activating an incense buff. Early on, you search for three shards of a cracked, floating mirror hidden around an island like the scattered limbs of a slain slasher villain. Once fixed, you use the mirror to queue up research projects that complete in real time. I like VVytchfyre a great deal, but it feels tormented by the lingering ghost of a much less interesting version of itself. 

After you clear one of the game's enemy encounters, a pop-up appears announcing a hearty 'Deus Vult'. This alone would be a good enough reason to celebrate its lack of other players. You're not a crusading knight, Gary. You spend your evenings critiquing stranger's bone structures on Reddit. 

Instead of robots whose implicit curiosity about bad board games makes them at least partly adorable, Witchfire is world full of wretched murderghosts that seem to exist in a perpetual state of purgatorial anguish. Despite this, it feels less haunted to traverse than Cargo Hunters because of how insistently operatic it is. Its soundtrack is ghoulish ambience and oppressive cathedral core but its actual soundtrack is a percussive hail of the biggest bullets - bullets so large and so loud they prevent you from ever feeling quite as alone as it seems you should. 

The Forever Winter is also grimdark and operatic, but to the point of self-parody. It contains an unnecessary amount of skulls to get the point across that this is the sort of place that contains a very large quantity of skulls. Flayed, disemboweled bodies hang from the ceiling but they're all Ken-doll dickless, presumably because gore is cool and dicks are weird. I find this strange because I see my dick every morning but I'd be properly freaked out if I woke up without any intestines. 

You play a man with such a comical large-coat-to-small-head ratio that he gives the impression of just having shoplifted the entire canned goods section of three separate Big Tescos. He is the game's only source of levity.

It's almost impressive how the Forever Winter's PvE-only experience mimics the exact flavour of smirking sadism and Real Gamers Only bluster that makes me avoid competitive extraction shooters to begin with.

Maybe it's better with friends, but so is unclogging the sink. I have nothing else to say about it, which I'm fine with, because it doesn't have anything to say for itself you can't replicate by browsing the art in an old 40k codex while getting kicked in the shins. This said, the actual concept art by Rael Lyra is very good.

Escape From Duckov feels like a good place to extract. It pumps tender, wintery jazz into your hideout and contains silly jokes about graphics cards made from potatoes. But it's also full of terse and tense encounters with deadly avian bastards. You hear them coming before you see them: the telltale quacks of encroaching violence floating in on the fickle winds, like feathers plucked from the bum of a traumatised trench pigeon. 

Escape From Duckov is not-named Escape From Tarkov, which might make it the ur-single player extraction shooter by virtue of its announced dedication to confident-if-deritative yes, but as opposed to the genre's traditionally chaotic yes, and. It's actually far too good to be confined to parody, although I'm not sure how many people would have played it if was called Quackstraction or whatever. 

It's very generous, very quickly with extra backpack space and good guns. Perhaps this is because it doesn't have to worry about balance, only keeping you feeling good and rewarded. That's true of the other games I've covered too though. Truthfully, Escape From Duckov is just nice. 

It's also the game where the genre's inherent push-your-luck systems feel the most overt. Again, this is true of the others - removing the explicitly contemporaneous online bits from the hyper-contemporary extraction shooter allows the stuff you can recreate with pen and paper room to flex. I think it stands out more in Duckov, though, since the game's silliness softens both the militaristic prepper vibes of a Cargo Hunters or Forever Winter and the survival horror of a Witchfire - things that might otherwise narrativise such a quaintly satisfying system into invisibility. 

Despite all this, some of the most triumphant runs in Duckov are the shortest. Runs where you choose a specific objective given to you by the objective bird that lives in your house, then set out to complete it and return immediately afterward. Get two wood, for example. Duckov does not require you put yourself in serious danger to make any progress whatsoever. Again, it follows the rules of neither horror nor military fetishism. It is happy to reward you consistently for simply being an idiot gun duck. 

Escape From Duckov feels like a good place to extract, but I return to Cargo Hunters anyway. I walk straight up to the first robot I see and ask him out loud if he wants to play Lowpoly. He shoots me. I ask him again. He shoots me again. This is probably the same result I would have gotten if he'd been a real person, although I can't be certain. I suppose that if you avoid the risk of getting hit by rocks completely, you'll never know how often someone might decide to throw you a bone. 

The robot's name is Parker Schmidt, although I have to kill him to find that out.