Lucy recommends: Casualties: Unknown

Hello everyone! Hope you've had a great week and are raring to go for the Halloween festivities.

I'm writing this on the flight to Digital Extremes HQ for the finale stream of The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Quest this weekend. We'll be kicking off at 12 pm ET on Saturday October 31 (I'm told this is Halloween), so make sure to tune in and help us raise money for a great cause!

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Okay, on to this week's pick: Casualties: Unknown

What's Casualties: Unknown?

It's the far flung future and you are a hybrid creature held captive by a human corporation. After they lose some precious cargo on a dangerous foreign planet, they send their disposable experiments, i.e. you, into the dark depths to bring it back. Casualties: Unknown is a challenging survival sim that'll keep you coming back for more.

What's the gameplay loop of Casualties: Unknown?

👇 Descend into the depths. Make your way down into the cave carefully and scavenge what you can to stay alive. Weigh up how much you're willing to risk to potentially grab some good loot while crafting what you can and making tough decisions about what you're able to carry with you

🤕 Keep an eye on your health: things can and will escalate quickly. The game features a simulated cardiovascular and limb damage system that you really need to keep track of. Think of it like playing The Sims on extra extra hard mode. You're going to get cold and tired, your wounds can get infected, you can bleed out, your bones can break, and the cold darkness of the caves takes a heavy mental toll. As your body succumbs to damage, your vision can be impaired, you start to mumble incoherently and struggle with movement, but you'll still want to keep trying to take one... more... step...

💪 Craft, train, and sleep. There's no getting around it: the caves are miserable, dangerous places to be, but there are small things you can do to keep going. Train to improve your strength, intelligence, and resilience, and craft items that will help you out. Taking precautions and being prepared can be the difference between a simple scrape and a life-ending injury

Who's making Casualties: Unknown?

Casualties: Unknown is being developed by solo dev Orsoniks. Influenced greatly by flash games such as Plazma Burst 2, they decided to teach themselves how to create their own games in Unity from around age 12, releasing free solo projects on itch.io. They started work on Casualties: Unknown in early 2024, and the success of its demo (previously known as Scav Prototype) encouraged them to turn it into a full game.

Try the Casualties: Unknown demo yourself!

Why Casualties: Unknown rules

Huge thanks to Orsoniks for answering my questions over email!

Trauma team: I've played many games in my time, and most health mechanics and systems are, frankly, a little boring! Oh, here's a life-threatening injury, press this button and it magically goes away completely. Sure, that keeps the player moving toward the next reward, whether that be combat or loot, but it's not a particularly interesting system if you think about it. In Casualties: Unknown, it's the complete opposite, and I love it.

There are plenty of hazards in the dark, and even if you scramble carefully down a cliff edge to avoid a broken leg, but obtain a cut on your arm instead. That unassuming little scrape can bleed out or get infected--oh and by the way, curing an infection is not a simple one-time deal, you have to keep an eye on it because it can get re-infected. In having such a robust health system, the ticking clock of injury and danger of potential death changes your immediate next move. What must you heal up straight away? What can you choose to ignore for just a little bit longer? Is there even any coming back from this? After crafting what you can, you also have to go through the motions of actually bandaging yourself up, a stark reminder to not get injured like that again.

Orsoniks was greatly inspired by the Neurotrauma mod for Barotrauma when developing Casualties: Unknown, but says they've always had an interest in anatomy and trauma care. Despite this interest, they joke, "Funnily enough, I probably could never work an actual medical job because of how squeamish I am."

Tough luck, kid: Casualties: Unknown can be tough. Not in a pixel-perfect platform jump way, getting around is easy enough, but in a "Oh God, this has all gone to shit in the blink of an eye" way. As injuries get worse, your character begins to struggle getting around and the screen starts to go red, there's a sense of panic that compounds into real stress for the player. Don't get me wrong, I love that. I see it as a test of how well I've mastered the game's mechanics and how much I can push myself to get as far as I can (although, based on my runs, I'm still not that good at it and I don't get too much farther). The feeling of successfully picking yourself back up from the edge of death is unbelievable. I am a champion for mere moments before being immediately humbled again.

I say it can be tough because there are actually difficulty levels to choose from, and its reputation as being a difficult game is one that slightly confounds its maker. "The game's difficulty was always configurable, though it has been expanded on in the 7.0 demo update. Generally, I don't want to force any specific difficulty on the players. It's their game, and they should be able to play it however they want to play it," says Orsoniks. "The game has picked up a reputation for being brutally hard, which is kind of odd to me because of how easy you can make the gameplay by adjusting a couple of settings."

Creature comforts: The playable characters, or Experiments, are a sort of human-animal hybrid, and they are desperately adorable, already garnering a lot of fan art in the game's subreddit. Their cuteness (and they are very cute) is immediately juxtaposed with the horrors that they go through and at times it makes playing Casualties: Unknown a little, I don't know, tough? They whimper softly as they experience pain, and mumble incoherently as their mental state begins to worsen. Part of me wants to do all I can to get them to the surface, to get them the hell out of there, but the other part just wants me to keep playing to see what we can uncover together. According to Orsoniks, this juxtaposition was unintentional, and the characters became these creatures because they were simply better at drawing them than actual humans, so they stuck around over the years.

Just one more go: Despite its bleakness and (self-imposed) difficulty, Casualties: Unknown is a game I can't stop thinking about. Each move is a risk and each injury a challenge to overcome, and when you do overcome, the relief and joy are borderline addictive. Its demo has seen enormous success already, and I think it's going to do exceptionally well when it releases on November 9.

Thanks for reading! I'll be back on Monday with Peek at the Week. I'll leave you with my Halloween costume from this week's episode of the Voicemail Dump Truck on Giant Bomb. Byee!