Your priority in any city-building game is to expand outwards – more roads, more houses, more businesses. Anoxia Station turns that against you. As the leader of a mining operation deep, deep beneath the Earth’s surface, every time you drill into an untouched rock face you risk hitting a pocket of radiation, releasing a geyser of magma, or disturbing the sleep of a gargantuan, subterranean terror. Generators. Refineries. Water pumps. Everything has to be pushed together and built on top of one another, such is the intense claustrophobia of your lightless, airless underground sepulchre. Condensation drips down the screen. Static and VHS tracking lines disturb the picture. In principle, Anoxia Station belongs to the same genre as Cities Skylines 2 and Frostpunk, but it takes the city-builder’s mechanical staples and twists them into something terrifying and unique.
It’s 1988 and the surface of our planet has been obliterated by mass industry and overpopulation. The only way to keep what’s left of humanity in light and heat is to dig, dig, dig towards the Earth’s core, trying to dredge up the last remaining pools of crude oil, and convert them into fuel. Each stage of Anoxia Station takes you further underground.
As well as combating a depleting oxygen supply, low water rations, and mounting waves of cesium 137, every time you suck your bounty out of the ancient stone, you trigger a seismic collapse, and have to relocate your mother base another few hundred feet down and start over. Convectors will process water into breathable air. Radio towers will use sonar and echo imaging to find you the crude. It’s a strategy game where you have to suffer and sweat over every square foot of fresh territory.
Also lurking in the depths are giant moths, weevils the size of a football field, and other twisted, screaming abominations that beggar description. Automated defenses can keep you and your workforce safe. You can also pipe in calming music to try and distract your miners, scientists, and mechanics from the monsters tapping on their windows. But everything in Anoxia Station is a race against time. City-building games are normally about creating something expressive, something beautiful. This one traps you in the dark and forcefeeds you its nightmares.
Like Solium Infernum, one of the best 4X games on PC, Anoxia Station strips back the systems and menus to make every decision and every spent resource feel like the difference between life and death. It reins in the scale, taking the rudiments of the genre and compressing and boiling them until all impurities are removed. Released today, Friday May 9, you can get Anoxia Station on Steam for $13.49 / £11.51. Just go here.
Otherwise, try some of the best grand strategy games, or maybe the best horror games on PC.
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