Abiotic Factor is Pokémon Pokopia for a different flavour of '90s childhood
I'm a minor Pokémon fan compared to many of my peers, but Pokopia, its recent spin-off, has swallowed dozens of hours of my time. It contains none of the typical monster battling and instead lets players build a world the pokémon would want to live in. This requires completing an almost fractal todo list, in which every task breaks into half a dozen other tasks, until suddenly you've spent three hours tidying, planting, and building. It's hard to put the game down when any action feels like progress and there is always another drip of dopamine just a few seconds away.
I was thinking about the near-inevitable wave of PC games inspired by Pokopia that will follow in the years to come, and also wondering what other game worlds might benefit from the Pokopia treatment: that is, a rich, survival-lite experience about constructing and repairing a world we initially explored through a different lens. The answer I came up with might surprise you if you didn't read the headline of this article.
Here was my impression of Abiotic Factor when people were discussing it around its original release in 2024: it's a survival game, and it's inspired by the slapstick