Bite-sized Review:
Anoxia Station

By Chris Picone, 07 May, 2025

Wow. Just wow. Anoxia Station is amazing. While at its heart Anoxia Station is a citybuilder, the survival elements are very prominent. You play as the commander of the station, a bizarre mining platform that can either become mobile or else deploy to make use of its building functions. The Earth above is doomed, and you've been sent below to find a mythical ocean of petroleum supposedly buried deep beneath the surface.  Anoxia Station is mission-based and has a surprisingly strong story. 

Aesthetics

I can't even describe Anoxia Station's graphics. The art style is just bizarre. Deeply thematic, although because almost everything you build and encounter is unique to the world (convectors, gassohrung, repositories..) The map is tile-based and while all levels are subterranean, each is subtly different from the last. For example, one is a cold map, where everything is covered in ice and snow, where another is a hot map, abundant with magma lakes. Strange alien flora and fauna are everywhere. And once you enter the portal, things get even stranger. The maps are quite large but fortunately you have a scanner (which looks a lot like a heat map) to help you find objects of interest.  

Gameplay

As each level loads, you analyse the situation and checkpoint goals are determined to enable you to survive whatever the immediate threat is long enough to make use of whatever bounty each level has to offer. For example, on the cold map, your first task is to upgrade some of your convectors to boilers in order to raise the temperature while also producing oxygen. If the temperature gets too hot or too cold or you run out of air, you die. To build the boilers you'll also need to check your scanner and start drilling to try to find sources of water and raw petroleum, and then start building things like a generator to power your buildings and a refinery to turn your petroleum into useable fuel. Fuel is your predominant resource as you use it to build, move, attack, drill - most actions. But many of these resources are interactive. For example, your generator can be upgraded to a hydro generator, which is much more powerful but consumes your water. Also, on any other map, the heat created by your boilers can be deadly. One quirky mechanic I've never really encountered before is that in Anoxia Station, an upgraded building is not necessarily an improved version of the building preceding it. Sometimes an upgrade might switch the input or output or have a totally different function. It takes some getting used to but I really like it. 

Verdict

Anoxia Station was an incredible experience. Although the gameplay and themes are very different (other than being about citybuilding while trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic environment), it had the same profound impact on me that Frostpunk did. That persistent sensation of impending danger, that the meagre existence you had eked out of this beautiful but dreadful world could be snuffed out at any moment. And hope. If you're a fan of city-building survival games (apparently they're a thing now?), this is a game you'll want to see through to the end. 

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2924310/Anoxia_Station/