Engine Eternal

I have a soft spot for the tiny studios that swing for something atmospheric on a shoestring, and Absolutely Cookage, by all evidence a two-person outfit, has done exactly that with Engine Eternal. The setup is quietly compelling: a post-apocalyptic Old World, a last train called the Engine Eternal, and a desperate run toward somewhere called Paradise. You board as a survivor. The destination is never guaranteed. That framing alone puts the game in interesting territory before you even load into a dungeon. The core loop asks you and up to three online co-op partners to disembark at procedurally generated locations - abandoned houses, bunkers, whatever the Old World left behind - and scavenge for fuel and raw materials before something in the dark notices you. Fuel is not simply a progression token; it is the circulatory system of the whole run. Burn too much on travel and you lose access to the onboard fabricator, the suit repair machine, and the teammate reanimation technology that keeps a run alive after someone goes down. Raw materials can alternatively be fed into Engine upgrades rather than burned as fuel, which unlocks travel to more dangerous destinations. That tension between burning resources now versus banking them for a harder (and presumably more rewarding) stop is the game's most interesting decision space. The first-person perspective, stylised art direction, and community comparisons to Lethal Company suggest the game knows exactly what mood it is chasing: slow dread punctuated by sudden, desperate sprinting. The Steam tags tell you a great deal: Lovecraftian, Psychological Horror, Dystopian, Perma Death, Robots, Aliens. That is a broad horror palette for a small game, and whether the creature design has the variety and personality to sustain repeated runs is the open question at this early stage. With only a handful of Steam reviews at launch, and a community post noting that control rebinding appears incomplete, this is clearly a game that arrived a little rough around the edges. The demo released two months before launch gave interested players a preview, which is the right call for a game asking you to buy into a fairly specific co-op fantasy. Community sentiment draws heavily on Lethal Company as the reference point, which is fair, but also sets a high bar for sound design and monster distinctiveness that every game in this space has to wrestle with. For solo players, the game supports single-player, but a procedural dungeon-crawler built around co-op communication and shared resource anxiety is going to feel quieter and more mechanical without a squad. The real version of Engine Eternal is three friends on voice chat, one of whom is rationing fuel while another has wandered too far into a bunker and stopped responding. If that sentence sounds like a Saturday night to you, this is built for you. If you play horror games primarily for story beats and atmospheric scripted encounters, the roguelite randomness may work against you. At its price point, the barrier to entry for a curious group is low enough that a rough edge or two is forgivable, provided the developers are communicating and patching.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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