Dead in Antares Review – Get Lost Somewhere Familiar

Dead in Antares Review

There are a lot of management games out there, along with quite a few survival games, and countless RPGs. It’s rarer to find a game that smashes together all three, but that’s exactly what you find in Ishtar Games’ Dead In series. The latest installment, Dead in Antares, refines the formula while continuing the story in surprising ways. The sequel removes some of the friction from the previous entries, while focusing on the mystery, the story, and the characters. Dead in Antares is a unique Frankenstein of a sequel.

Stranger on a Strange World

The setup to the previous Dead In games were classic desert island fare. Dead in Bermuda was a lot like Lost. A plane goes down on a tropical island, and a group of survivors must learn to live together or die alone. You place the survivors on different stations where they collect resources, or deal with all sorts of stats and meters. Characters have numbers representing their hunger, stress, fatigue, sickness, and injury, plus you need to keep everyone hydrated. If any of those numbers hits one hundred, they’re perma-dead. 

Dead in Vinland complicated both the gameplay and the story. Now you had a central cast of 4 main characters, but with a huge ensemble of potential companions. The story doubled down on the mystery and pressure. An evil warlord yearns to enslave everyone on the island and mysterious alien figures resembling norse gods played out their own agenda. Dead in Vinland was a game that stuck with me for longer than I would have anticipated, and I’ve returned to it quite a few times over the years.

Unexpected Familiar Faces

I idly wondered where on Earth the next Dead In game would take place, so I was surprised to find the new game takes you off Earth entirely. Dead in Antares is a classic ‘crashed on an alien world’ game. You get 10 survivors, the same in every run, and you’ll use all the same camp stations, but with an exoplanet twist. The mechanics are a little bit more refined, and I generally found survival easier than the previous two games.

What surprised me was how connected this story was to the previous games. There aren’t any shared characters, and you don’t need to have played the last one, but if you did you will get another perspective on the Norse god guys and what they are all about. There’s a really good story to slowly peel back, grafted onto a satisfying base manager.

Fight For Survival

Ishtar Games took a break from the Dead In series to make The Last Spell, a roguelike tactical siege defense game that was much crunchier than their other releases. I wish you’d see a little more of that spirit in Dead in Antares. Instead, some of the randomizing elements have been simplified. Instead of creating a different group every time with an eye towards their skill and dynamics, you always have the same group of ten in Dead in Antares. If one of them dies, the game ends with them. This gives you fewer interesting avenues for failure.

Each run, the story remains the same. Dead in Vinland eventually added a randomized roguelike mode, which was pretty fun. It’s possible Antares do something similar, but that wouldn’t be playing to the games’ strength. Replay isn’t high at the moment, but getting through the games’ narrative is more important. The presentation reflects this, with an upgraded water-color art style. I wish Antares itself where a bit more unusual of a place. It uses the same purple fungus aesthetic as you’d find in games like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. It looks alien, but familiar.

Replay isn’t the attraction in Dead in Antares. The mystery and characters are the headliners. The strategy layer is just interesting enough to stay engaging. The graphics and sound have progressed, but the basic skeleton of the game remains the same. Dead in Antares is a worthy cap to the end of the Dead In trilogy. 

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***