You can pet the headcrabs in Abiotic Factor, and now they'll follow you around
Cheese and loyal pets (two important items on Maslow's hierarchy of needs) have been added to the co-op survival crafting game Abiotic Factor. The dairy product manifests as various suspiciously coloured cheese wheels which you can cook and eat, while loyalty comes in the form of freakish pets that can now follow your every move. The pets themselves are technically not new to Abiotic Factor, but their player-tracking behaviour is. "There is, as far as we know, no limit to how many pets can follow you at once," say the devs. Hmmm. I wonder if any scientifically minded folks will test such a hypothesis.
I say "headcrabs" in the headline because the game has a lot of Half-Life vibes. But really the pets are these creepy hedgehog critters normally considered pests. You can tame them and enjoy them as companions for as long as they survive the hostile lab environment. The pets have "very small, adventurous brains," we are told.
These walkie talkies will let players chat over greater distances, whereas before in-game chittering was limited to proximity chat. Not a huge change for anyone simply opting for Discord. But in co-op chaos like this it's often more fun to opt-in to the built-in communication of the game world. "For now, Walkie-Talkies will allow players to hear you all over the Facility -- and even beyond," say the creators. "Later on we have some more plans with these cool little communicators, and we may impose a few more sensible restrictions." Sounds ominous.
Abiotic Factor is basically "Half-Life but funnier and with friends" - a co-op survive-em-up with poo jokes and the ability to make "weird soup" from inedible items. It's in early access for the moment, with staggered updates planned to bring jetpacks and new sectors of the lab to explore, all before the 1.0 version comes out sometime in winter. You can check the full changelog for this update but here are some highlights plucked out for you, because my hobby is reading patch notes freed from context:
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