Let’s take a look at the thrilling demo for Anoxia Station by Yakove Butuzoff and Abylight Studios! Debuting for Steam Next Fest, Anoxia Station is a strategy colony sim set in a horrifying post-apocalyptic world. Survival depends on finding fossil resources while fending off the hostile wildlife of the deep. Can you survive a level? Or will death take you and your crew?

A World on the Brink

After a supervolcanic eruption devastates the Earth’s surface, rendering it uninhabitable, humanity teeters on the brink of extinction. Nations now rely on the Terranauts—miners sent into the hellish depths of this dying world—to extract petroleum, a resource crucial for sustaining humanity’s essential infrastructure and survival.

The year is 1988, and as the Earth’s condition worsens, your crew joins an international group of Terranauts deployed to a demilitarized neutral zone. Venturing into extreme depths, you brave intense radiation, scorching heat, and shifting rock, only to discover an enormous, abandoned mining station. Hidden within is information about a massive crude oil deposit that could fuel humanity’s salvation. But first, you must locate it.

A Base is Only Temporary

Anoxia Station’s demo consists of the first level of this campaign. The tutorial offers helpful hints without being too intrusive or restricting your actions. First, you must set your station down. It’s mobile, but when travelling your crew are restricted to the station interior. Once you’ve settled down, you can build a number of units that generate resources – generators for energy, refineries for fuel, compressors for oxygen, ect. Your drill tears through the rock around you, revealing both resources and dangers you’ll have to deal with.

The radiation unleashed in the world’s collapse has massively affected the surviving wildlife. Giant bugs and fungi threaten your station and jeopardize your progress. This first level gives you very few tools to deal with them – just the impulse weapon on your station and the hand grenades from your mechanic. You can unlock more weapons from the research in your laboratory, but that takes time you may not have. 

Once you have depleted the resources in the level, it is time to pick up and go. Before the next earthquake hits, you have to find an escape tunnel. Even then, be mindful of the distance between your station and the exit, because each tile takes a day to cross. Whether you live or die, though, that’s a wrap on the demo.

Decayed Beauty

The forbidden depths of the Earth are both perilous and breathtaking. Immense pressure, heat, and natural forces have created stunning wonders: quartz crystal caves, vast magma lakes, expansive salt caverns, and rivers of moonmilk. Most of these you won’t see until the full release, but there are hints of these in the first level. The environments are rendered in a distinctive isometric style, grounded in real geological processes.

The soundscape also immerses you in the terror of this unforgiving setting. It blends the deafening roars of shifting rock, the harsh clangs of mining and welding, the unsettling clicks of something inhuman, and the occasional, haunting scream.

One thing to note, though, is that the Anoxia Station is quite dark, in both graphics and tone. Make sure your monitor’s brightness levels are set accordingly. The developers also promise plot and political betrayals on a human level in the full release reflecting the desperation of a people facing extinction. Anoxia Station’s demo is gripping, for sure, but definitely make certain you have the stomach for it.

The demo for Anoxia Station is out now as part of Steam’s Next Fest. Be sure to grab it before the Fest ends on March 3rd.