A top-secret expedition has gone awry, so go in and find out what happened to the team in this survival horror developed by Enigmatic Machines, but just keep one thing in mind – you are not alone.

In Expedition Zero, you explore corrupted forests and abandoned research facilities to uncover the truth about the top-secret expedition. With limited knowledge of what happened, you are sent in to discover strange anomalies, reveal secrets, and fight to survive or die trying.

Survive in the brutal climate of extreme temperatures and snowstorms, find resources to upgrade your equipment to give a higher chance of survival. Just remember to light fires to keep warm – getting too cold will make it hard to see and slowly chip away at your health. Throughout the game, you’ll find printers, which are essentially crafting tables, and you’ll be able to make new gear, however, each printer has different craftable gear recipes, so if you need something specific, you’ll need to navigate to the correct one.

Fight… or run away, it’s up to you, I suggest fighting if you have the ammunition. Use your trusty bolt action rifle and fight back against the horrifying monster that seems to always be following you, or use your axe or crowbar to take down zombie-like foes to conserve your ammo for something bigger. Shooting down the monster pursuing you will only vanquish it temporarily, so quickly use this time to gather materials, clues, anomalies, and craft what you need before it comes back.

Horrifying dark forests, snowstorms impeding your vision, and spooky red eyes staring at you when you finally spot the monster, you can say this game hits the right notes for a horror game, and when the monster gets up in your face, it gives you more than a fright. I did have inconsistent dips in frame rate even after changing the graphical settings a few times, even with higher system specs, people still reported similar problems. Hopefully, they fix this, but it’s still very playable.

The creaking of trees, snapping of branches, stomping of feet, grunts, and growls, and screeches of the monsters wanting to kill you will keep you on edge and constantly spinning around, thinking “where is it?” Along with the howling of the wind and roaring of the snowstorms, this game has great sound design giving off a very spooky and eerie atmosphere, exactly what you want in a horror game.

Overall It’s a great horror experience. It’s a little challenging at first with very few resources, but once you get deeper in and after gathering enough resources and equipment, fighting back becomes more viable and quite satisfying. I do think the game would be better with a blueprint system rather than printers in different locations.

Written by: MrVibeAU