Expedition Zero Review

Expedition Zero is a horror survival title that has you scoping out an anomaly zone to find out what happened to humanity and figure out how to destroy the monster stalking you.

Survival horror is probably one of the genres I play the most, and I have never struggled so much in one until this game. Although Expedition Zero isn't overly-complex — you only have to deal with two meters: cold and battery charge — it somehow manages to be quite challenging, especially due to the lack of tutorials outside of the bare minimum.

The game starts off by throwing you into an empty, abandoned cabin. The protagonist mutters something to himself about how he shouldn't have come and how everyone forgot about him before you hear someone from within the house calling him on the radio. There's barely an explanation, and he tells you to go find him. At this point, the game offered tutorials for everything a gamer knows by memory now: how to move, how to interact, how to jump, etc., and that is all you get.

It took me a while to realise I had to interact with the "strange machine" ⁠— which turned out to be a sleigh ⁠— in front of the cabin to travel to where the guy from the radio had told me to go. Once you arrive there and survive the stealth sequence, you approach the guy, and he sends you off on a mission to find the anomalies around the land. His only advice: take your flashlight and a gun. That is about it; thenceforth, you survive, find the anomalies, and get rid of them.

The lack of proper tutorials on the game's unique mechanics made it a bit of a pain during certain situations. For example, it took me an awkward amount of time to understand how crafting works, as I didn't get why I was sometimes able to craft things and other times not. It turns out that every "printer" (crafting table, essentially) stores its own blueprints. This means that you ideally go to all the ones on the map to find all or most of the upgrades. Thankfully, they repeat, so you'll most likely stumble onto them eventually. Another small complaint I have is that I stored a bunch of things up until about halfway through the game when I realised that despite their misleading tooltips, they weren't actually going to be usable: they were meant to be disassembled. The reason for my confusion was the fact that some of the items you find literally say they're meant to be broken down for resources, and others say they're crucial for some devices. None of them were ever used; in fact, I hoarded so much that I had an excessive amount of resources at the end. 

I wouldn't have expected to like the game as much had I been told what the game is like on paper — no NPCs, no boss fights, shallow crafting system, and only two mechanics to keep in mind: your battery and your warmth. All you do throughout is stay alive long enough to find the other anomaly and cure the area from it while you pick up random notes along the way to further unfold the story.

Expedition Zero doesn't feel like a survival horror once you get a grip of the gameplay. I went from dying incredibly often to suddenly becoming immortal just because I understood the mechanics better. This wasn't a typical snowballing point, either — the game is just a bit uneventful. Whilst this sounds horrible, I found it quite reminiscent of Death Stranding: you find an anomaly, you manoeuvre around the enemies, you cure it, and then you move on to the next one. It feels like a walking simulator set in the apocalypse, and I found that quite charming.

Managing your battery and warmth is incredibly simple: you just collect wood to light up one of the heating areas, and you make sure not to use your flashlight or gadgets too often to conserve battery until your next encounter with a charging station. Additionally, as you unlock more blueprints (which are really just upgrades), managing them becomes easier, especially with some added perks, such as quicker movement speed and less stamina loss when running.

I gave up fighting the shadow enemy after a while and decided to just run for cover until it left me alone; I am pretty sure it's immortal and fighting it is futile, but I couldn't say as I just dodged it for the rest of the game. It was too fast, hit too hard, and it felt like it was just there to waste my bullets. As for the others, which are zombie-like enemies that run at you with a cleaver, they turned out to be quite easy to handle as long as I did so from a safe range. The combat is quite clunky, and the worst thing you can do is click reload, as you will have to sit there and watch the protagonist add the five bullets painstakingly slowly without any way of interrupting it. This was one of my biggest complaints, as I resorted to sniping everyone from far away to avoid constantly dying due to cumbersome combat.

As for the story, although I'm not a big fan of the game trend of leaving scattered notes to unfold the narrative, I felt like Expedition Zero did a pretty good job at it. There weren't obscene amounts of them, so I didn't get burnt out from the reading, and I didn't have to remember a thousand character names. I just wish the developer had taken more time to explain the story properly, as I don't feel I got to grasp it. It's a shame, too, because what little bits I did manage to understand seemed quite unique and terrifying; I also have no idea what the monster that stalks us from the tree is or how they came to be. I just know it was terrifyingly quick and a great way to add tension to the game.

Despite how empty Expedition Zero feels, I really enjoyed it. The new take on the apocalypse, which is full of isolation and emptiness, was quite jarring, and the monster is absolutely terrifying, thanks to its speed and appearance. All of this tension and distress is amplified by the phenomenal sound design, which makes exceptional use of silence and the howls of the wind.

All in all, Expedition Zero was enjoyable to me despite its confusing crafting, lack of NPCs and boss fights, and overall slightly uneventful experience. The gameplay was challenging enough, I quite liked the story, and the overall atmosphere of the game really captured the essence of the apocalypse: empty and terrifying.