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