The Surge

The Surge is Deck13's answer to the question nobody asked out loud: what if Dark Souls happened inside a collapsing robot factory run by an evil megacorp? You play Warren, a new CREO employee who gets welded into an exoskeleton on day one, immediately suffers a catastrophic accident, and wakes up surrounded by malfunctioning machinery and coworkers who very much want to kill him. It is not a subtle setup, but it is an efficient one, and the industrial hellscape that follows has enough visual grime and atmosphere to carry you through the first few hours on sheer curiosity alone. The core loop is lifted straight from the Soulsborne playbook: you fight enemies, harvest scrap (the currency and XP equivalent), bank it at a medbay, and lose it all if you die before reaching the next one. What The Surge adds is a limb-targeting system that genuinely changes how you engage with every fight. Lock onto an unarmored leg to farm crafting parts, or chip away at a shielded arm to unlock a weapon schematic. Every enemy encounter becomes a small tactical puzzle about which body part you need right now versus which one is safest to hit. It is a smart mechanical hook, and it keeps combat from feeling like pure attrition for a solid stretch of the mid-game. Where the game starts to wobble is in its structure and writing. The CREO campus is a series of interconnected industrial zones, and while the level design has some genuinely clever shortcut work, the areas blur together visually faster than you would like. The narrative gives you just enough lore terminals and environmental storytelling to stay interested, but the actual character work is thin. Warren is a blank slate who never develops, and the supporting cast amounts to a handful of NPCs sitting in the safe zone with fetch-quest dialogue. If you come in expecting Disco Elysium-level worldbuilding or even a meaty BG3-style branching arc, adjust those expectations sharply downward. The story here is set dressing, not substance. Build variety exists but feels narrower than the genre usually offers. Exoskeleton rigs slot into different combat styles, heavy versus agile versus balanced, and weapon classes each have their own move sets worth learning. Past the forty-hour mark, though, the upgrade paths converge more than they diverge, and a second playthrough reveals fewer hidden depths than comparable Souls-likes tend to offer. The boss encounters range from legitimately tense to frustratingly gimmicky, and the final act drags in a way that suggests the budget ran short before the ideas did. For RPG players specifically: the mechanical depth is real but lives almost entirely in the combat layer. If you need rich dialogue systems, meaningful choices, or a world that reacts to your decisions, The Surge is not that game. It is a competent, occasionally inspired action game wearing RPG clothing. Worth your time if you like the Souls formula and want a sci-fi coat of paint on it, but do not expect the narrative or build complexity to carry you on their own.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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