Stare at an imprisoned god to stop the apocalypse in Sarco, a no-saves horror game in which you'll also, somehow, have to explore a gutted scientific base

If a coffin opens in a reactor core with nobody around to see it...

In Hello Andromeda's Sarco, you're trapped in a scientific research base with a sarcophagus housing a cosmic being that starts to open when you aren't looking at it. Friends, I am never going to beat this game - not because I dread to gaze into the abyss, lest it gaze into me, nor because as with Schrödinger's cat, I do not credit the sealed cosmic being with a stable existence prior to the box's opening. No, I'm going to fail because my parents taught me that it's rude to stare and they did not add the disclaimer "...unless you're trying to keep the lid on Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young."

Even if you aren't cursed by cringey English middle class politeness, you can't just keep gawping at the sarcophagus, because you're steadily running out of oxygen. So in between bursts of eyeballing the imprisoned god, you'll need to search the surrounding corridors for a lasting solution and presumably, an escape route. I'm somehow not expecting the lasting solution to be a thick roll of duct tape, but that would be very funny. Here's a trailer.

It seems the sarcophagus will open slowly enough that you have time to explore. But every time you return to it, the Steam page warns, the entity's behaviour will change. "It will adapt, forcing you to abandon familiar routines and find new routes. Understanding its behavior may be the only way to survive it."

There will, at least, be no jumpscares. Just the steady grinding of that coffin lid, in the back of your mind. "Sarco builds its horror around a persistent, visible threat rather than sudden scripted shocks," the devs continue. "You know where the danger is. You know how to delay it temporarily. The tension comes from knowing that you cannot keep watching forever. Both your time and resources are severely limited while your enemy grows stronger." Helpfully, Sarco doesn't let you save the game. It's designed to be finished in one sitting.

Influences given by the studio include Paratopic, Alien: Isolation, and Blackshard. I hadn't heard of Blackshard before. It's a megastructure exploration game that came out last year and still has a demo, as of writing. Looks cool!

Hello Andromeda are them wot are also making eerie open worlder Fog'n'Silence, which I've literally just written about. "About a month ago, we finished working on the Fog’n’Silence prototype and decided to take a short break to rest and recharge," Hello Andromeda comment in a Steam post from yesterday. "However, being chronic workaholics, we ended up developing a new project instead of actually taking that break."

Speaking as somebody who also tends to burn himself out (and who isn't based in Kyiv, a city under active bombardment) please do take an actual break, Hello Andromeda! Maybe rig up a livestream so that your followers can collectively monitor the hellcasket, while you catch up on your sleep? Sarco is due out later this year.