Nova Antarctica Review: Clunky & Difficult Journey

Your mission is to reach the South Pole and figure out what’s happened in your local environment. There isn’t much information about what happened and you are on a solo mission. Scrounge resources from your surroundings to deal with difficult weather that threatens to kill you. Create and upgrade tools to harvest materials quickly while keeping your battery pack high. Some side quests offer upgrades if you are willing to explore your surroundings.

Nova Antarctica introduces a tough survival challenge where resources are limited. Making your way to the objective quickly is vital, as is upgrading your tools to survive. Balancing resource gathering while searching for the objective is a difficult challenge and it’s rewarding to accomplish. However, the difficulty is great and several aspects of the UI make things harder than necessary. If you want a decent survival challenge, be prepared to fight more than the environment.

Nova Antarctica is available on PC for USD 19.99.

Antarctica is desolate with few resources available.

Story – Reaching the South Pole

The goal is to reach the South Pole by any means necessary. You can’t make the trek all at once, instead searching for various landmarks to save your progress. Something happened at the South Pole and it’s up to you to figure out what happened. As you explore Antarctica, you discover various smartphones, tablets, or articles lying around. They provide some context as to what happened in Antarctica, helping you piece together the mystery.

You don’t get much detail similar to High School Dirty Secrets. All you know is that you must reach the South Pole. What you find doesn’t give you much information. Even some side quests are simple and don’t appear related to your journey. There is an option for branching stories but it’s difficult to figure out where the branching points are. It’s a story where you must make several assumptions and you might never truly realise what happened even at the end.

Sometimes you can find warmth in an unforgiving landscape.

Gameplay – Your Objective or Exploring?

You must explore your surroundings and find your objective by tracking a general direction. In the meantime, you must gather resources to create healing items, restore stamina, and build protective barriers. Antarctica has blizzards and unusual winds that threaten to end your journey prematurely. While reaching your objective quickly is optimal, you leave behind several resources. Figuring out what you should do is a key part of the challenge.

Every stage is much larger than it initially seems. There’s lots of resources to find that can help you upgrade your tools. However, spending too much time risks dealing with blizzards that could kill you. If you run out of resources, you are forced to restart at the beginning. This makes you decide whether reaching the objective is more important than building resources. As fun as that sounds, it’s more difficult in practice.

You must scavenge whatever you can find to survive.

Finding your objective often results in vague directions because you aren’t actually sure what you are looking for. You don’t know what your inventory limits are and it’s not easy to learn how to expand them. Alerts for a weather change are present but the timing isn’t clear, forcing you to guess when preparing. It feels like the game is stacked against you, forcing you to hope for the best. Any deaths force you to restart from the beginning, making failure painful even if you can keep some crafting recipes.

Audio & Visual – The Desolate Environment

Antarctica is full of brown and white colours with a few variations coming from the technology you find. The weather has stripped everything bare and there’s not much left. Most of the colour comes from the objects you build and the suit you wear. However some of the 3D visuals can collapse into each other, like when jumping from a ledge but you aren’t tall enough. This can shake the screen for some time until things settle down.

There isn’t much sound or music in the game either. You mostly hear the harsh winds and some ambient noise as you progress through the stages. Construction does make noise but you won’t think much of it once the object is placed. The most important noise is the sound of a blizzard because it indicates you should create shelters. Once the winds come in, the sound is fierce and often dangerous though its absence indicates it’s safe to move.

Nova Antarctica was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by Renaissance PR.