Review of “Casualties: Unknown”

Survival is a neat little gameplay mechanic where you guide a somewhat unlucky protagonist to stay alive and thrive in some desolate, hostile environment, with no help but your own two hands, or manipulators or what not. It's a rather common element of many games, even those that don't necessarily focus directly on it, as it allows to guide the player with relatively simple system of needs. But in many games, it fades into the background, as you accumulate more resources, wealth, and such.

What if you can't?

Casualties: Unknown (previously Scav Prototype) is an indie game that focuses pretty much solely on survival. While your stated goal is to descend down, your entire focus will be on trying to stay alive. And if avoid said goal, there's a mechanic to nudge you.

It is not a game for everyone. The way it presents the gameplay, how it interacts with player, is visceral, and at times quite graphic. It doesn't go out of the way to tailor itself to a specific audience, rather it emerges from how the game is by itself. It is intense, and it is sharp to hold onto. Please take breaks if you play it.

You're put in charge and control of a cute fluffy creature that is called an "Experiment", or "Expie" for short, simulated with a nice physics ragdoll outside, and a complex medical system inside. This is your player character, or rather one of many. While they are robust and quick to heal, the cave in which you have to guide it is very hostile to them. Survival will be tough, the resources scarce, and traps too fucking many.

Gameplay

The main mechanic of the game is the medical system. Your Expie has exhaustion, hunger, thirst, blood and many limbs that can all be hurt in various ways, as well as the mood. Which varies from being hurt by a fall, dislocated, broken, and infected, to damn glass shards and shrapnel being embedded in it, and more. All of those woes require some resources and care to deal with, and more often than not you will lack them, or be left with subpar care. Is it worth stopping a minor bleeding if you risk an infection? Should you disinfect with an acid fruit now, or try to find a better thing as the arm swells up?

You'll be making lots of those small decisions every time you misstep. Doing everything perfectly is not possible - you can not avoid every trap that will maim you, every dark drop directly into a hazard, every slip that sends you tumbling down 50 meters head first. And of course the turrets- beep.

Your Expie will suffer, bleed and die often. And they are not a silent protagonist that can take all and any abuse of the world you push them into. They have a mood, and are quite vocal. Almost everything in the game has a remark of some kind that your Expie will tell you. Too cold, too hot, too exhausted, too in pain, or too depressed to go on and bother with a bandage. Oh and they will make noises as they get hurt, too.

The game tracks many things about the health. Oxygen saturation, blood pressure and heartrate, immunity (and sepsis), body temperature and exhaustion. Bleeding directly reduces the amount of blood your character has, which affects them in many ways as simulated systems interact with one another. All will affect what your character can do, in small ways. Unless it is far beyond the norm, or you have multiple problems at once.

Even dropping in water that is too deep will get your Expie soaked, dropping their body temperature, making them shiver and move slower. Thankfully you can warm up with some exercise - which includes digging! Just keep an eye on their exhaustion.

Mood system is easy to overlook. In most games it's a small debuff, or just a lack of bonus. Here it starts that way, but the further down your Expie's mood drops, the more it will affect what you can tell them to do. And this split between you - the player, and the expie - the player character, becomes sharply obvious the worse it gets. When you hit far enough into the negative mood, into "Depression", the character will refuse more and more orders. All those falls, agonizing glass shards, awful meals and corpses they've seen will quite literally push them to give up and do nothing - at the best. And at the worst - you get to see exactly why this game comes with content warnings. They don't want to go on, so...

The game feels immersive, from the UI and sounds, to the interactions you go through as you try to juggle your resources across inventory so you can craft or heal. But the audio has to be the biggest part of it. Every button press and interaction will have subtle noise associated with it, every movement, and every kind of painful mess you end up in. When shit hits the fan, a persistent noise will creep in, and it will stay there until the issue resolves in one way, or another. The harsh noise of ambient drone will make you excruciatingly aware of the pain your player character is experiencing, how bad it is, and if it's getting worse. You'll become quite familiar with it, as you try to keep the poor creature alive at all cost, until you run out of resources and can do nothing else but watch.

Empathy

I think the biggest draw of the game for me is the ability to guide someone in a seemingly hopeless situation, and to try your best to help them. And unlike most games, the character feels distinctly separate from you. You control almost every move they make, you wrap the gauze around their bleeding arms, you direct them down into the hell caves, and you keep them alive when they fall one time too much. But if you don't treat them well, they'll be less and less of just your avatar into that world.

It is not a game that gives you a puppet to control and throw at the wall with no care, but rather it gives you a separate character. And then it pushes on your empathy to help them, sometimes quite literally begging you for it, all while screaming at you to understand how bad things are for them.

For a lot of people this game will be too much. The character is too alive, and things happening to them are too painful to witness (and feel, if one's immersed enough). But there's still an undercurrent of hope within it all. Blooded, scarred, but hope nonetheless. If you take good care of them, they will survive despite everything. And this aspect of being able to care for the player character, and making sure they remain alive, is what attracts me to this game.

It's an artwork of pain and empathy, of hope and survival. That you can live through awful situations, and help someone do the same.

Art

It is difficult to define art in a tidy logical way through a checklist. How many pixels do you need to put together to declare something an artwork? How many words and letters, how many brush strokes, pen movements, presses on the keyboard? How many lines of code does it take to make an app become an artwork?

Art is subjective, but if there's a main core of what art is, then it's communication. It is a way to relay an impression, or a feeling, or a subjective observation to someone else - even if it's just your own self in the future. It's a dialogue between two people separated by the boundary of where, when and who they are.

I genuinely think that this game fully deserves to be called an artwork. What you feel and take from it is subjective, intense and gives a lot to consider. From your relationship with games and the game characters within, to how you're dealing with life around you, and how you're taking care of your own body - rather than someone's else.

The game is still in development, and my impression might be slightly out of date as it changes and grows. But even if it stays where it is, the entire post is meant to be a subjective impression, personal gushing about a neat interactive experience I've got to try out, so your own experience might be quite different.

I do recommend you to take a look at it, whether by yourself or through a recording or a stream, and see what you think of it. And make sure to take breaks!