Nova Antarctica, RexLabo’s new story-focused survival game, reinforces my belief that cold weather is superior to hot. When it’s cold out, you can (usually) mitigate it by putting on more layers. There’s no bad weather, only bad clothes and all that. When it’s hot, though? There are only so many layers you can remove. Once you’re considering hanging up your skin on the coatrack, you know it’s much better to be cold. That said, I should perhaps draw the line at minus thirty, unless I intend to wear my entire wardrobe at once.
I’ll stick to games like The Long Dark and, indeed, Nova Antarctica for experiences like that. I’ve a fondness for survival games where the principal antagonist is the world around you. That is true survival to me, where you need to constantly be on your guard. However, I feel like Nova Antarctica cuts itself into too many pieces in the pursuit of exploration, and the end result feels muddled and frustrating. There is an intriguing survival game in here, but it needs to pump the brakes first.
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
Nova Antarctica opens with a young child travelling to the South Pole, to investigate a mysterious signal. Earth is in dire straits, with a series of disasters and wars wiping out much of the population. This signal is the last hope. I’m not entirely sure why they send a single child to investigate it, rather than a big boat of burly men, but here we are. The child must progress towards the source, scrounging up as many resources as they can along the way, and crafting anything they can’t find.
Nova Antarctica takes a rather streamlined approach to the survival genre. Rather than worrying about separate food and warmth meters, it’s condensed down into suit energy. If you run out of this, you die and start the stage over. Alongside this is stamina, which is mainly used for actions like mining and digging. It’s a system with some value, as it means a constant ticking clock. The weather changes every thirty seconds or so, meaning things can very quickly turn sour. The biggest danger being blizzards, which can kill you rapidly if you’re not behind cover.
Before we dig too much into the gameplay, I want to take a moment to comment on aesthetics. Snow covered landscapes naturally look beautiful and Nova Antarctica does them justice. There are ruins of human occupation everywhere, sitting half-buried in crisp white snow. It’s a pleasant game. There are also animals that you can rescue, and they trigger cutscenes about their (usually tragic) backstory. It’s heart-rending stuff at times. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the forest fire in the mid-game, which is appropriately intense. There’s no faulting the aesthetics here, and the music isn’t half-bad either.
Scrounging Up Supplies
The main goal of Nova Antarctica is to progress through various stages in order to reach the seed vault at the South Pole. The world map is broken up into smaller maps, called stages, which have clear entry and exit points. You could just hop straight through, but Nova Antarctica puts an emphasis on exploration. The constantly dwindling health means a source of supplies is essential, and there are usually little story fragments to be found. Each level has an animal to rescue too, which quite often brings gameplay benefits. Riding the wolf was definitely a standout.
I like this emphasis on exploration, but a lot of Nova Antarctica feels like it’s working against it. For one thing, health dwindles even when you’re warm so taking your time isn’t really an option. What’s more, the rapid weather changes mean there isn’t really a good time to explore, as blizzards are dealt with by hunkering down in one place. Half the time I had to abandon expeditions before they’d begun, because blizzards were coming in rapid succession. I had to bail on the stage so I didn’t run out of health kits. Doesn’t help that the map is absolute rubbish, making it hard to figure out where to head to. One bit of snowy wasteland looks like any other.
Towards the end, I just grabbed what supplies I could easily reach and left. It didn’t help the feeling that much of Nova Antarctica was spent just bumbling about. I would find things that would ‘purify’ my suit, for instance, without any idea what that meant. Communication stations can be repaired, which adds a little dialogue to the end of the stage, but I’ve no idea what else it does. I just seemed to wander from place to place, fiddling with machinery with no tangible benefit. It makes the exploration all the more frustrating, as I have no idea if I’m even doing anything.
Nova Antarctica – Muddled At Heart
There are other minor frustrations too. There’s only a small variety of materials to collect, so the difficulty drops off as you progress, as health and stamina items are cheap as chips to craft. I didn’t even feel the need to upgrade my tools, as I could find what I needed just lying around. Blizzards inconsistently destroy your crafted items too, so I had to abandon a cat because a storm destroyed my boxes and I didn’t have the time left to craft more. There are also quite a few bugs. I kept getting stuck on ledges or having buildings pop up around me. Then it all culminated in a depressing, unsatisfying ending, with a not-so-subtle nudge at playing through again.
In the end, I feel like Nova Antarctica is trying for a meditative experience, but the rapidly changing weather and constant ticking clock rather ruin it. It’s hard to meditate when someone’s holding a gun to the back of your head. There were moments where it came together, like building a shelter in a big ice field, but the individual stages are too small and exploration is too brutal for it to really stick in the head. A pleasant enough experience, if a little cold.
