tl;dr: A story-driven first person shooter with incredible atmosphere and worldbuilding, suffering from lacklustre performance and bugs.

If you can stomach heavily fluctuating frames and occasional game freezes, Industria could be a perfect choice as a short, story-driven fps. Heavily inspired by Half-Life 2, it offers a great mix between phantastic storytelling and real-world events. What starts in East Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Berlin wall November 9th 1989 quickly leads to an alternate dimension when our main protagonist Nora follows her boyfriend Walter through a secret machine called ATLAS.

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The jump from late 80s East Germany into, what looks like, an alternative 1920s dieselpunk inspired city called Hakavik feels familiar and alien at the same time. Humanlike machines roam the streets, by design killing everything on sight. It's here where Industria really caught my attention. The city of Hakavik looks calm,, even serene, so long as no machine is trying to hunt you down. Scattered belongings of its former ─ human ─ inhabitants really invoke the impression of a place that had once been teeming with life. Every now and then, you'll find bits of written lore, allowing players to piece together the information themselves. The story is never fully explained and parts of it won't make sense even after you finished the game, leaving me with mixed feelings.

The atmosphere is a very strong aspect of Industria despite music being very rare, almost absent. Instead, ambient sounds and noises add to the feeling of loneliness and isolation. Although the city is rather small and many doors won't open, you're still switching between bright open streets and damp, dark buildings. The latter make full usage of your flashlight, which never fully runs out but becomes less and less useful if you do not find a battery on time. The weapon at the ready, there was an almost survival horror-like feeling whenever I was inside of a dark building. Pumping and pulsating noises from the machines were omnipresent, their footsteps giving away their position.

However, the intelligence of these constructs felt a bit lacking, almost comical at times. At first, everything is rushing at you but, if being damaged enough, many robots turned around and just ran in circles. This would make sense if they had actual means to repair themselves but the way it worked here it was almost as if somebody played the Benny Hill theme in the background. Combat didn't feel challenging and ammo was scarce until I noticed that some boxes could be crushed, providing plenty of options to take down robots without worrying about running out. What gave me a headache though were the forced autosaves and the very rare occasions to save at a typewriter, again giving off the feeling of old-school survival horror. These typewriters were almost always placed in a nonsensical way, like right before or after an auto-save.

Industria looks rather nice, especially for an indie game. This doesn't explain the abysmal performance, which became an issue after chapter 2, only getting worse the further I went. Sure, my RTX3060/i7-10870H/32GB RAM notebook is not exactly high-end but come on, running everything on medium settings with balanced DLSS and I'm still not getting frequent 50-60 fps feels rather poor. In the end, I even chose performance but this didn't seem to have much of an impact. Sometimes, I got short freezes or hiccups when shooting enemies, which naturally is the worst situation for said problems.

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Had I not known beforehand that Industria is a relatively short game, lasting around 2-4 hours, I would have abandoned it midway through the playthrough. Still, the story really resonated with me and I wanted to see its end. The latter felt abruptly, which could explain the recent announcement of Industria 2.

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Hakavik whenever I was not worried about my laptop catching fire or something. The second half of the game feels very unpolished, untested and, to a degree, unfinished, as if time and resources were running out for the project though. Therefore, I only recommend getting Industria on sale. It offers a unique setting and a story that kept me thinking, embedded in a mixture of walking sim and survival action. If you finish the game, still looking for answers, there is a great guide that summarizes everything up nicely while also trying to give answers to questions you're surely going to have.

Free on Epic ! 😀

Quaint small 4hr game with feelings of old Half Life and a little survival horror.
Pay full price to support an indie dev of 2-3 people.
Buy it on sale if you want to just play it.