The topic Casualties: Unknown is Noita for furries, and oh so deliciously miserable is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
“This game contains depictions of violence, self harm, and general misery,” opens Casualties: Unknown, a short but still considerate content warning for the survival game ahead. Boy howdy is that last one accurate! We’ll get back to that, first, how about some setup.
Casualties: Unknown is set in the year 2XXX, and you are a bioengineered anthropomorphic creature capable of thought that has been sent to a planet to recover some lost cargo. Upon arriving at said planet, you must essentially head downwards, as far as I can tell, through 11 layers of this alien world. It is a game very much about simulation. Simulating physics, lighting, and the like, all to make you conscious of your every move, ever so slightly like a Noita, but for furries. There’s resources to gather, crafting, tools to use, minigames for things lockpicking, systems upon systems.
It is also a game that I would describe as meticulous; there is not much automation to be found here, but there is an intensely interesting medical system. In exploring this planet, you must care for every single part of your body, right down to individual sections of your limbs. Fall from too great a height? Perhaps you cut your thigh and need to regularly apply antiseptic. Maybe you break your arm, so you need to wrap it in bandage, another minigame that literally requires you swivel the fabric around your appendage, with the number of rotations determining how much you use (and how much you have left).
You don’t just have to consider the outside of your body, but the inside too. There’s all manner of conditions to experience, hunger being a classic one, and many more besides. I know that because I think, through playing the demo, I experienced them all. Very early on in my attempt at a run I fell and hurt myself quite badly, or so I thought. Turns out the pain can go so much further than you think.
So, in an attempt to end the run early without quitting, I continued to fall from height after height, doing more and more damage. My character would cry out in pain, sometimes in words, sometimes in keymashes. The screen would literally go blurry, sometimes I couldn’t physically move unless I stopped to rest, it was… disconcerting. After putting my character through the ringer, I eventually got to the point where I thought they were dying, the screen pulsing red, literally nothing except for a couple of pixels visible, until another minigame where you claw yourself back from the depths appears.
I did manage to figure out how to die, eventually, just not before all of the status conditions littering the bottom of my screen were replaced with random jumbled letters because I had done so much damage. Casualties: Unknown most certainly is a game that depicts general misery, and the degree to which it simulates it is fascinating, if morbid.
Truth be told, I sucked at the game. It is not easy, there’s a steep learning curve, and for the purposes of writing about the demo there’s only so much I could see. There is clear intent behind the pain though, and because of that I do at least want to see more. You can wishlist the game on Steam now.
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