Some of these environments clearly adhere to the Big Industrial Facility Rulebook, in that all maintenance shafts must look alike, but the majority of each area has its own unique style and a creative layout for its circuitous pathways.

You’ll spend the lengthy campaign in an exo-suit exploring a series of locations that check all the trademark boxes of a near-future industrial zone. Billing itself as a “Hardcore Action RPG,” developer Deck 13 assimilates the difficult and labyrinthine style of games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls, and adds its own unique flavor to deliver a challenging and fun – though a bit disjointed – sci-fi survival adventure. Exploring each new area - from fancy boardrooms to rundown factories - elicited a growing sense of dread, an unease at the certainty of death hiding around every corner. It’s a huge, labyrinthine space, but I still felt like I understood my place in it thanks to a liberal number of recognizable landmarks. CREO’s headquarters feels like the perfect video game setting.

It doesn’t nail the details of the plot, but The Surge builds a masterfully creepy atmosphere.

For as much as it tries to wrestle with the ethical and moral quandaries of technology and humanity’s impact on nature, most of its revelations are predictable for anyone who’s read any dystopian sci-fi. I met a handful of friendly characters and picked up dozens of audio logs expanding on the plot as I progressed through The Surge, but the story is more interesting in theory than in execution. Something has driven most of the other employees to murder and violence, and it’s up to Warren to figure out what happened - or at least survive long enough to escape CREO.

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