Spooky survival game Angst knows just I want: Survival mechanics that get out the way of my quest to steal a sad orb from the guy in the basement

pcgamer.com:

Survival games! They're all the rage. Since the dawn of time, mankind has dreamt of exacting vengeance on its hated ancestral enemy: the tree. These games make those dreams reality—you punch trees, fashion their corpses into bizarre shapes, set them alight. Generally just a lot of tree torture going on.

Angst, whose ongoing playtest I spent a while mucking around in this morning, starts out much the same way. You wake up, it's cold, hit the trees, you know the drill. But things start getting weird when the tutorial voice on your banged-up ham radio starts imploring you to stick food in an old wooden chest. That would, ordinarily, be quite normal—you need to preserve food in these games all the time—but the voice makes clear that the food isn't for you.

Which hooked me, I've gotta admit. Although survival mechanics generally rub me the wrong way, spooks get my attention like nothing else, and Angst caught me in precisely the correct Halloween-y mood to pique my interest with its pitch-black nights, shadowy figures at the edge of vision, and a quest to collect an 'Orb of Sorrow'. Diablo 4's item-naming team must be moonlighting.

No, really, it gets dark. Pitch-dark. And when it's just you in the stygian night surrounded by the hungry eyes of wolves (also, at one point, a particularly violent rabbit; I'm not sure what was going on there), things do genuinely get quite tense as you try to grope your way back to the nearest safehouse. Descending into a basement in search of materials—or a sphere of sadness—even sparked my Stalker neurons a little. I didn't even mind the combat, a sparse mix of whack, block 'n' dodge that doesn't ask too much from you.

So I found myself genuinely surprised when, as an inveterate survival game disliker, I actually made it to the end of the playtest. The scares kept me interested, and to be honest, the survival stuff never got too intrusive. Yeah, you've got hunger, sleep, and temperature metres, but they never really decreased fast enough