Abiotic Factor's Dark Energy update is so vast and comprehensive it opened a rift right into The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, where developer Deep Field Games revealed the new faction, new gizmos, and enormous new area coming to the Half-Life inspired survival game. Indeed, it was large enough that the studio delayed the update out of 2024, and only now has Dark Energy formally arrived into the GATE Cascade Research Facility.
In a lengthy Steam update, Deep Field Games further detailed the many strange corners of the Dark Energy update. For starters, it adds a huge new area called 'Power Services', which includes another area known as The Reactors. Deep Field Games refuses to divulge much information about the biome, as it likes to "Let the Facility speak for itself", but I can tell you it's filled with bioluminescent plant life, a fact I cleverly deduced from some tiny clues in the image below:
Sherlock Holmes, eat your heart out.
Perhaps the most significant addition Dark Energy makes, however, is a whole new faction called The Gatekeepers. This strange group can be found mainly in the Reactors. Again, Deep Field is cryptic about their motivations, but they dress an awful lot like Warhammer 40,000 marines and look about as friendly, so I'd suggest you approach with caution.
Alongside expanding the world and story of Abiotic Factor, Dark Energy also makes a few interesting mechanical contributions. Players can now build and deploy teleporter pads. These can be linked together to instantly traverse the facility (no doubt with zero adverse effects). If you prefer your transportation less…disintegratory, you could instead opt to try Abiotic Factor's new hardlight technology. This can be used to construct bridges across chasms, while also coming in handy as ad-hoc cover and protection.
Those are the major features Dark Energy adds, but they're accompanied by a much longer list of smaller additions. These include *inhales* a new pet, an expansion to the Flathill area, new fishing zones, new armour, a fancy retractable harpoon spear, military grade explosives, improved lasers, a short-range jetpack, a construction gauntlet, a grenade that seems to generate black holes, and a dimension in a backpack. Phew. Presumably, Deep Field added that last one so you can carry all the other gizmos Dark Energy stuffs into the game.
The release seems to have gone smoothly. Deep Field has issued multiple hotfixes in quick succession since the expansion release, which caught my eye as this can be indicative of an update not quite going to plan. But that doesn't appear to be the case here. Certainly, it hasn't adversely affected Abiotic Factor's 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Steam rating, with 96% of gamer thumbs still pointing toward the sky.
There's a launch trailer for the update that you can watch above. Dark Energy is supposedly the final major update Abiotic Factor will receive before hitting 1.0, due to happen later this year. Various members of the PCG team have praised its inventive take on survivalism over the past couple of years, and I personally can't wait to get my lead-lined mitts on it when it finally teleports out of early access.
