Five-year-old survival/crafting game Arctico just got Steam Deck and controller support from out of nowhere

Fishing in a kayak — (Image credit: Claudio Norori, Antonio Vargas)

Arctico is sort of like Subnautica without all the underwater dread. Walk into a body of water in Arctico and you'll suddenly be in a kayak, cruising over the calm blue surface toward a fishing spot. It may be a game about expanding a research base in a lonely, hostile environment, but it's a much more relaxed one, where you've got a team of pettable dogs to pull your sled right from the off.

Though it came out of early access in 2020, Arctico has had some significant updates since then. There was a base-building update in June of this year, with a bunch of improvements, adjustments, and optimization to the base-building mechanics, and now there's been another update out of the blue, adding controller support and Steam Deck verification.

A few years ago, Nat Clayton took Arctico out for a spin. As someone who once spent six months training sled dogs, her standards were high, but Arctico's chill vibe impressed her. "The low arctic sun casts a soft light," she wrote, "sky turning red in the twilight hours, a low soothing hum complementing the howling wind and crunching snow. The vibes are impeccable, and more than a little bit reminiscent of the wonderful Sable."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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