SystemsCritical

Something came aboard with the freight. Somewhere off its route, a cargo freighter drifts in the dark. An alien specimen boarded it in transit, and the ship did what it was built to do with a hostile inside: it locked itself down. Whole sections lost power. Navigation froze. The crew are gone. That's when the ship wakes its last line of defence. You and your crew are its emergency-response robots, activated in the cryo pods to follow protocol: save the ship while it can still be saved. Save the ship, until you can't Protocol starts with RESTORE: rewire the dead sections one junction box at a time, plot a new course by hand, and deal with the thing in the walls. But the ship is failing, and the alien is helping it along. Once it's too far gone, protocol flips to EVACUATE: grab the cargo worth saving, haul it back to the escape pods, and get everyone out before the freighter goes with it. Every ship is generated, from small haulers to massive bulk carriers, so you never know the layout before you wake. It can't see you. It can feel you. One player can choose to be the alien. It sees only vibration: every footstep ripples across the deck, and a robot standing perfectly still all but vanishes. Brush against its silk and you light up. It climbs walls and ceilings, strings webs across the halls, and will kill if you get too close. Stay together. Talk quietly. Proximity voice chat fades with distance and goes muffled behind doors, so the crewmate who wandered off sounds exactly as far away as they are. Splitting up gets the work done faster. That's the problem. Features - Online co-op for up to 5 robots, against an alien player or the AI - Two-phase protocol: save the ship while you can, then escape with its cargo when you can't - A playable alien that hunts by vibration, spins webs and climbs walls and ceilings - Procedurally generated derelict freighters in four sizes - An armory of laser guns, flamethrowers, thermal X-ray pads and mobile chargers - Physical claw hands: grab, drag, carry, and fight over the freight - Downed is not dead: jump-start a crewmate with your own battery - Proximity voice chat, plus ship-wide comms for the whole crew - A shared ship map the whole crew can draw on, each in their own colour Early Access Systems Critical is in Early Access. The core hunt is fully playable; more ships, objectives, tools and alien abilities are coming, shaped by what crews tell us on the Steam forums.