Petro-horror strategy game Anoxia Station makes Frostpunk look positively welcoming

You know when you drop your nice, shiny pen and it rolls under your bed, and you look under there and see it winking from the depths of a stygian expanse of superannuated dust bunnies, lakes of mildew and anomalous debris that absorbs far too much light? Just me? I need to get out the mould spray more often.

OK, how about when you were a kid and you lifted up a nice, round stone and the damp, fertile soil beneath writhed away from you in a fervent knotting of pellucid, boneless bodies and the tickling of a thousand little legs? Right. Anoxia Station is that and also, a turn-based strategy game about drilling for oil. The recently released Itch.io demo is rough around the edges, but I do adore the vibe.

In Anoxia Station you lead a huge, mobile rig into the depths of a dying world. In each chapter, you’ll deploy your rig so that you can build resource-generating structures such as refineries and convertors, search for pools of petroleum on your radar, then either relocate to the area or expand in that direction.

You’ll also have to worry about keeping your workforce alive, happy and non-mutinous. This is difficult, because there is a lot down here that can either kill you or severely bum you out: heat, suffocation, radiation, earthquakes, marauding fungus, acts of human treachery, oh, and the insects. You’ll definitely want to avoid the insects.

Right now, my proud rig the HMS Dork Fortress is nestling close to a clutch of eggs the size of sperm whales. I do not know what lurks in the eggs and I do not wish to find out. If anybody from my crew asks about them I will say that they are just really sticky rocks. I am also going to build a watchtower pronto, so that I can equip my crew with grenades.

Each semi-randomised tile-based level is a mass of unholy 2D art, viewed from a cramped, angled perspective. Buildings form shadowy huddles of pipes, windows and turbines, their fittings blurred by hanging mist and the insidious, queasy wobbling of the camera. The soundscape consists of machine tones, tectonic rumbles, and unidentifiable organic noises. Building anything here feels like a presumption, like you’re inviting the darkness to take an interest.

Again, I adore the vibe. I’m less keen on the interface being made up of very small icons and text. It can be hard to find the necessaries, even given tutorial hints, and that’s bothersome because each turn is on a timer. You can pause using F11, but you can’t queue up orders while time is suspended. I’ll probably acclimatise to the fiddly presentation, but it’s going to be a pain if I have to manage any especially elaborate drilling operations. Right now, I’m only worrying about the tiles around my rig. Especially the one with the sticky rocks.

According to developer Yakov Butuzoff, Anoxia Station takes particular inspiration from Into The Breach, Polytopia, and Frostpunk. They’ve written a little Steam blog about the core mechanics, putting an emphasis on random map generation and unpredictability: apparently, one of the key objectives is “to make sure something crazy happens every turn”. The full game is out… at some point.