Dark strategy game Anoxia Station is Dwarf Fortress for oil drillers with a squirming helping of body horror
I gaze with alarm and approval upon the recent phenomenon of "dark strategy" or "horror strategy" games, a devilish parade of top-down drag-clickers, from The Fabulous Fear Machine to The Tribe Must Survive, that strive to find the fear in a genre that typically places you at a managerial remove. The best-known is probably Frostpunk, with its perpetual raging against the dying of the light, its ceaseless scrape for coal and wood as the temperature falls. Anoxia Station, announced this month, is similarly driven by the gathering of fossil fuels, and similarly shaped by questions of worker death and morale, but it takes you deep underground - into a sumptuous, brutal world of quartz crystals, salt caves, magma lakes, moonmilk rivers, swirling gases and, judging from the below trailer, enormous maggots and centipedes. Larva lakes, amirite.