Player Preview - Subaeria

 Title: Subaeria
Developer: Studio Illogika
Status: Early Access
Release Date: 2016

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1NGMidI
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1l05olG

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the rouge-lite puzzle action game, Subaeria, developed by studio Illogika, primarily a mobile developer this will be their first original PC title. In a somewhat near future, post-apocalyptic setting where the world as we know it has completely flooded, you play a young girl called Styx who has recently become bankrupt or credless as it’s called in the game after taking out numerous loans from the big two companies of the world, Soma and Amos, to feed her virtual reality addiction. Unfortunately in Subaeria your bank account determines which areas of the underwater labyrinth you are allowed to enter and entering a restricted zone can end poorly.

In every zone of Subaeria, robots controlled by Soma and Amos known as cleaners patrol the area for any citizens found where they shouldn’t be. If any are found, they will be met with deadly force as the cleaners will aim only to kill with their sawblades, laser rifles, missiles and other weaponry. While these Cleaners are deadly killing machines, they also come with one major flaw in that if a cleaner controlled by the Soma Company comes into contact with the Amos company cleaners they will destroy themselves. A pretty big flaw considering that both companies’ cleaners patrol the same areas and are conveniently colour coded for you to take full advantage of. There are outlier Cleaners with no company association though that you will have to be aware of. To be able to move freely through zones and areas you will have to clear out each room by tricking these robots into colliding with each other or with other elements like laser walls or explosive barrels. There are multiple puzzle elements to help you eliminate the Cleaners like pressure plates that change the colour of laser walls, motherboards that need to be activated and more. You won’t be able to leave a room until there is only one Cleaner left at which point it will shut down and open the doors for you to proceed on your journey. Every zone is procedurally generated with the key areas being shuffled around requiring you to do a little bit of exploring to get where you need to be, plus each new run will spawn different programs and sniffs to use providing a somewhat unique experience with each new run.

 

Using the collision method of eliminating the cleaners is really the only way to do it as you have no weapons that can deal with them directly. However you do have a little droid that follows you around and is capable of loading up 2 programs that can help you out including things like changing a Cleaners company owner, Placing a decoy to attract Cleaners away from your position and a healing program. Many of these programs will require your drone to get up close and personal with the target and it can only go about an arm’s length distance away from you so you do have to play the risk and reward game when attempting to use one of these programs. The programs also work off of a charge system that when depleted will render that program useless and drop it from your droids ability list. Programs aren’t too rare though with you easily finding a new one by the time you have depleted the equipped ones charges. There are also passive upgrades for your character called sniffs that can be found around Subaeria just like programs can. These sniffs give bonuses like reduced damage from lasers and a distance increase that your droid can travel away from you. Both programs and sniffs while being obtainable for free out in the world can also be purchased with creds that you can find randomly around the world or by destroying Cleaners however they can be a bit pricey.

As you travel through the different zones of Subaeria you’ll meet other people with their own little story’s and snippets of information about the world. To expand upon that there are also text logs that can be found around the world or just sent to your droid that can contain important story elements as well as some other information like emails from Soma and Amos about your financial status. The main overarching story to the world has the people of Subaeria separated into certain zones depending on their financial standing, the zones borders being patrolled by homicidal machines called Cleaners. Most of the poor people are addicted to an extremely popular virtual reality game called The Eden Experience that simulates Subaeria and its people, something that you later find to be more then it seems.

Other features of the game include multiple endings for each character with 5 endings currently in the game for Styx. There will be a total of 4 characters in the game at release ranging from the poorest in Subaeria to those in power.

Altogether Subaeria provides a really cool world and setting to explore with puzzles that will require you to think and act extremely quickly. Hearing one of the steel blades activate puts you into an instant panic especially as they somewhat camouflage into the background and suddenly appear. The puzzle variation is a little limited at the moment but that should fix itself overtime as the game is in early access. With the addition of the other 3 characters Subaeria will have a ton of replay ability especially if you aim to unlock every characters multiple endings. If you like puzzle games that aren’t exactly hard to solve but require you to act quickly and you enjoy the 1 game 1 life gameplay of Rouge-lites then Subaeria is defiantly worth a look.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Subaeria. The game will be officially releasing sometime in 2016 but is currently available on Early Access for $13 or your regional equivalent. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.