Abiotic Factor

Abiotic Factor is a survival game played in a first-person perspective. As scientists trapped in an underground research complex called the GATE Cascade Research Facility in the year 1993, players must craft tools and weapons, fight various alien creatures, and build their own home bases, alone or online with up to five additional players. The game's low-resolution stylised three-dimensional graphics and sense of humour are inspired by Half-Life.

Players create their own character and assign them one of various science-inspired specialisations which determine their attributes and may add permanent buffs or debuffs. The game features a role-playing games-style experience system and a skill tree, allowing players to upgrade their characters after the initial character creation.

Abiotic Factor takes place in 1993 within the GATE Cascade Research Facility, a vast underground research facility run by Garrick Advanced Technology Enterprises (GATE). Built to contain and study anomalous objects and entities, the facility houses a wide array of researchers across laboratories, power reactors, residences, and manufacturing sectors. Following the invention and successful testing of the "Dark Lens" in 1988—which enabled both temporal and spatial travel—the facility shifted its focus to studying "perforations" and the flora and fauna of the so-called "Anteverses". These rifts allow instantaneous travel across Earth, to distant exoplanets, into the past or the future, and even to parallel universes.

Several factions operate within or against GATE during the events of Abiotic Factor. The Gatekeepers, a branch of GATE's internal security force, who were originally tasked with protecting researchers and containing anomalous entities. While most continue to obey orders from Keystone, the executives of GATE, a Gatekeeper squad known as "The Unlost" emerged, convinced that resisting the flow of fate is meaningless and that humanity's role is predetermined. "The Order" is a rival organization with origins in an ancient scholarly sect dedicated to the study and suppression of anomalous phenomena.

Abiotic Factor was developed entirely remotely by a team of around ten. Managing time zone differences posed a challenge for the New Zealand-based studio, but this approach also enabled collaboration with creative talent from around the world.

At the 2024 New Zealand Game Developers Conference (NZGDC), Narrative Designer Henry Feltham recounted the origin story of Abiotic Factor. In 2020, when Feltham worked on a game for RocketWerkz, he met Geoff "Zag" Keene—who worked on the social deduction game Unfortunate Spacemen at the time—and Kate Colvin. Feltham later joined Keene and Colvin at Deep Field Games in early 2022.

Abiotic Factor received critical acclaim upon its full release. On the review aggregation website Metacritic, as of August 2025, the game holds a score of 88/100 based on 4 critic reviews. As per OpenCritic, 83% of the six critics recommend it.

Morgan Park of PC Gamer described it as "one of the greatest survival crafting games ever made" and a "classic in the making", awarding it a score of 92%. He praised the game for its unique portal worlds, breadth of content and intriguing combat options but noted that combat can feel clunky at times. PC Gamer later awarded the game as the best co-op game for PCs of 2025. 2 out of 10, describing it as a "charming take on the survival genre, full of great mechanics and systems, an engaging story and world" and praised it as "an absolute blast to play with friends".