Strategy games are often about spreading outwards – you start with a capital city, a military base, or a main street, and you build an empire, an army, a town. Inherently, the likes of Civilization 7, Manor Lords, and Stellaris are based around power. Get more. Create more. Become more. Terrifying, and boasting an arresting visual style, Anoxia Station is the complete opposite of its genre contemporaries. You need to stay small, stay hidden, and carefully safeguard the meagre resources you’ve managed to scrape together. If you don’t, you’ll be destroyed.
It’s 1988. Our planet has been obliterated by a series of apocalyptic earthquakes. The last remaining civilizations are hanging by a thread, their factories kept going, their people kept warm, by burning petroleum. You’re the overseer of a mining corporation, the job of which is to burrow inside the ruins of Earth and recover her precious crude oil. The deeper you go, the worse the conditions become. Radiation, heat, and oxygen deprivation threaten to kill your psychologically fractured expeditionary team. The earthquakes have also set loose impossible horrors never meant to be encountered by humankind. Every time you drill a new rock face, you risk awakening one of these Giger-esque gargantua. Anoxia Station is a strategy game where expansion is often lethal.
Build generators to convert fuel into power, pumps to extract water, and convectors to bring down the temperature and circulate air. Each turn brings you a day closer to another catastrophic earthquake – if you don’t secure all the raw petroleum and dig down another layer before deadline day, everybody, including you, will be crushed.
More distinctive than any of its mechanics is Anoxia Station’s chunky, analog horror aesthetic. It feels like you’re playing the whole game through a half-broken CCTV camera. Radio static, condensation running down the screen, the tracking and tearing from a CRT TV – everything feels physical and tactile, matching the punishing laboriousness of your engineers’ work.
We’re still waiting on a release date, but the Anoxia Station demo has just gotten a big update. One of the best new strategy games of 2025, if you want to try it out, go here.
Otherwise, you might want to play some of the best 4X games, or maybe the best RTS games available today.
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