Athanasia

Overview

Athanasia is a first-person survival horror game about a South American research facility that stopped being a workplace and started being a habitat. You play Carmen Flores, a researcher sent to find out why people keep vanishing from the SAIR facility, and the answer is a fully restored food chain. Raptors and their prehistoric cousins own the corridors now, and something older than the dinosaurs lives deeper down. Momentum Games builds it as a love letter to System Shock and Dino Crisis, and the DNA shows in every system: hackable terminals, route-opening tools, audio logs from dead staff, and an ammo counter that never feels comfortable.

This is Early Access, and it matters. The launch build contains roughly the first half of the game, the second half is in active development with a target of leaving Early Access sometime in 2027, and the price goes up at 1.0. Two patches landed in the first week, fixing corrupted saves, soft locks, audio imbalance, and teaching gorgonopsids to crawl through vents, which is exactly the kind of patch note that tells you what kind of game this is.

Who this is for: immersive sim players who resent yellow paint, Dino Crisis mourners, and anyone who thinks a game is improved by letting you feed a small dinosaur from your hand instead of shooting it.

Who should wait: players who need controller support, a complete story, or a map that labels its rooms. All three are absent right now.

Getting Started

The first 30 minutes

The opening hour sets habits that carry the whole run. Do this in order:

00-05  Wake up in the arrival area. Check every drawer before touching
       the main door. The facility is designed to front-load supplies.
05-10  Find the flashlight and equip it in a tool slot. Sound on,
       headphones if you have them. Audio is the primary radar.
10-15  Meet your first predator from cover, not from a corridor.
       Watch how it patrols before deciding it saw you.
15-25  Loot side rooms near every junction. Caches cluster where
       hallways branch, and nothing respawns.
25-30  Hack the first terminal you find even if nothing obvious
       happens. Terminals open routes and explain what killed people.

Beginner mistakes that end runs

1. Sprinting everywhere. The sprint is famously weak. Stamina drains fast and the speed gain is marginal, barely faster than walking. Sprinting at a raptor achieves nothing except draining the stamina you needed to swing a melee weapon.
2. Fighting the first thing that moves. Every engagement is a transaction. If a fight costs more ammo than it returns in loot and access, the dinosaurs won.
3. Skipping side rooms. The economy is closed. What exists at save creation is all there is. A missed cache is a missed molotov you will want later.
4. Ignoring terminals. Hacking is how the facility opens up. An unhacked terminal is a locked door you have not met yet.
5. Trusting autosave. Early patches shipped with a corrupted save bug, since fixed, but the habit stands: save after every capture of new ground, and keep two rotating slots.
6. Playing without sound. Predators announce themselves. The soundtrack also throws random stingers that mean nothing, so learn to tell the fake-outs from the real footsteps underneath them.

Core Mechanics Explained

The survival economy

Resources are finite. The game spawns a fixed pool of items at save creation and the pool never regenerates, so every bullet fired is permanently gone from the world. This is the engine behind every other system: stealth exists because ammo is scarce, crafting exists to stretch it, and traps and turrets exist to kill things for free.

Tools as keys

Progress through the facility is physical. Four tools come up constantly and each eats inventory space, which is the single most complained-about system in the game:

The inventory math is brutal: these four plus weapons, ammo, healing, crafted items and trap components overflow fast. Players routinely report hitting the ceiling in the second area. Until the developer changes it, treat inventory as a puzzle you solve before you need it: drop what the next zone does not require and stage items near zone transitions.

Crafting

Found components combine into improvised weapons, distractions, traps and consumables. The decision the game keeps forcing is the good kind: a healing item and a molotov can come from the same ingredients, and sometimes the molotov is the better medicine. Craft proactively. A distraction built before an encounter controls where the fight happens; one built during it is usually a eulogy.

Creatures and how they behave

The vent behavior is new as of Patch 2 and it changes old advice: rooms that used to be safe after clearing are no longer safe. Glance up.

The facility as antagonist

The SAIR complex gates progress through physical interactions: hack a terminal, jimmy a panel, refuel a generator, repair an elevator. Two giant vertical tube sections where you restore elevators are the early game's setpiece tests. Navigation is deliberately unassisted: most rooms carry no name or number on the map, so build your own landmarks. Note door states, fuel levels and which paths dead-ended. Players who blitz through get lost in the third zone; players who narrate their own map do not.

Progression Strategy

Priority order for the first hours

1. Tools before weapons. Find and secure the flashlight, retro-fixer, rescue axe and inducer. Every locked route in the early facility depends on them.
2. A dedicated utility loadout. Once you know a tool is permanent, accept its slot cost and stop reshuffling. Swap consumables around the fixed core.
3. Terminal coverage. Hack every terminal you pass, functional or not. Route knowledge compounds; backtracking through unopened doors does not.
4. Ranged weapons in this order: pistol first (ammo is common, damage is honest), bow second (arrows are recoverable and silent), shotgun last (devastating, and the ammo hurts to spend).
5. Trap infrastructure. From the second area on, place turrets at chokepoints before triggering any scripted encounter. The turret and molotov combination is strong enough that the first patch specifically had to fix their interaction.

What to unlock and when

The EA build does not use a skill tree. Progression is physical: new tools, new weapons, new zones. The practical milestone list:

Zone 1    Flashlight + first firearm. Learn patrol audio.
Zone 2    Retro-fixer and rescue axe. First turret. Start staging
          supplies at zone transitions. Expect inventory pressure.
Tubes     Repair both elevators. Restock before each tube. If you
          die mid-repair, you die to a resource problem, not aim.
Zone 3+   Inducer, molotov economy, vent awareness. The bestiary
          stops being only dinosaurs down here.

Weapon and Tool Tier List

Early Access, current patch. Judged on ammo economy, safety and versatility.

Step-by-Step Strategy

1. The clean first hour

Enter, loot the arrival area completely, equip the flashlight, and move junction to junction sweeping side rooms before corridors. Fight nothing you can walk around, and hack every terminal. Save when you first hear a raptor patrol and live through it.

2. Beating the first raptor without losing ammo

Find it with your ears. Confirm its patrol loop from cover. Place a distraction at the far end of its route, position yourself at a chokepoint or behind a trap, and let the world do the damage. If you must shoot, two or three pistol rounds into a distracted head from behind, then relocate immediately, because sound travels and raptors investigate their dead.

3. The inventory crisis solution

When slots overflow: carry one primary (bow or pistol), the four route tools, a stack of healing, and craft molotovs on demand rather than storing them. Stage the overflow, traps, spare ammo and heavy weapons, near the last zone transition, and treat each zone push as a loadout decision instead of a hiking trip. The developer is reading inventory feedback, so this pain may ease, but the stage-and-push habit stays correct regardless.

4. Surviving the elevator tubes

The two giant tubes are the early game's exam. Before entering either: full healing, recoverable ammo (bow), one distraction item minimum, and a turret if you have the parts. Repair work happens under pressure, and the fix is defense in depth: turret watching the approach, molotov ready for whatever ignores the turret. If a repair attempt kills you twice, leave, farm the surrounding rooms for components, and come back heavier. The tubes reward overpreparation and punish pride.

5. The vent-safe room clearing procedure

Patch 2 gave gorgonopsids vents, so adopt a routine: enter, back to a wall, sweep floor corners and vent grilles before looting, listen for claw-on-metal above the ceiling tiles. When a vent is active, do not loot with your face in a locker. Control the room's center, let the crawler commit to a grille, and meet it with a molotov at the mouth.

6. Feeding the locals

Coelophysis take food from your hand. It sounds like a cute detail and it is actually an economy play: every small creature you befriend instead of shoot is ammo kept, noise not made, and a corpse that does not summon its cousins. Carry one food item even when times are lean. It is the cheapest survival tool in the facility.

7. The deeper you go

Below the dinosaurs, the store description promises things older than humanity, and the bestiary gets progressively less classifiable down there. Rules change: assume sound lure tactics work less, assume the turret placement that worked upstairs needs rethink, and keep the bow relevant because silence is the one advantage that never gets patched out.

Advanced Tips

• The sprint is a lie; stamina is not. Stamina feeds melee swings and short bursts. Manage it as a combat resource, not a travel speed.
• Jumping kills momentum. Platforming sections feel bad because a jump forfeits your speed. Walk jumps, do not sprint them.
• Physics is a weapon. Thrown objects float, which sounds like a bug until you throw an explosive canister across a room into a pack. Shooting canisters sends them flying; aim, shoot, and let the engine do the reload.
• The soundtrack stingers are decoys. Random musical jumps carry no information. React to footsteps, breathing and claw-on-metal, not the orchestra.
• Batteries exist. Their function is obscure enough that players joke about it. Experiment: they interact with powered items, so try them on anything with a charge state before dismissing them as filler.
• Headphones after Patch 1. The launch build mixed audio hot in the left ear; the patch fixed it. Directional audio is now trustworthy, which makes it your cheapest early-warning system.
• Save after every zone transition and keep two slots. Patch 2 fixed a corrupted-save bug from Patch 1. Paranoia is a load-bearing habit in Early Access.
• Steam Deck works via layout editing. No native controller support, but players report binding everything needed onto a custom gamepad layout. Desktop play remains the intended experience.
• Watch the roadmap. Momentum published an EA roadmap at launch with updated versions promised, and patches land weekly. Balance in this guide is a snapshot of the current build; the vent AI alone proves systems are still moving.

FAQ and Common Mistakes

Is Athanasia multiplayer? No. Single-player only, with Steam Family Sharing.

How long is the Early Access build? Roughly the first half of the campaign. Several areas, unique tools, weapons and creatures, with the second half in development and 1.0 targeted for 2027.

Is the price going up? Yes. The developer stated the price increases at full release, so the EA window is the discount.

I keep dying to the first raptor. What am I doing wrong? You are fighting it. Track its patrol from cover, lure it with a distraction, and attack from behind at a chokepoint, or skip it entirely and come back with traps. Straight damage races are the losing play in this game.

Why is my inventory always full? Four mandatory route tools plus weapons exceed the space the game gives you. Stage overflow items near zone transitions and push each zone with a curated loadout.

My save disappeared after the patch. Patches 1 and 2 traded corrupted-save bugs, both since fixed. Rotate multiple save slots and save after every milestone. The habit costs two seconds and has already saved more runs than any weapon.

Do I need to kill everything? No, and trying is the most common way to run dry. Feeding, sneaking, luring and running are all first-class answers. The store page lists stealth, wit and arsenal in that order on purpose.

Is it scary or just action? Tension first. Scarce ammo, vent ambushes and unlabelled rooms pull the pacing toward dread, with action spikes when a plan collapses. The comparisons to Half-Life plus Alien Isolation have it right.

What should I not waste resources on? Shotgun shells on small game, healing items mid-fight when a molotov would end it, and bullets on coelophysis that would have taken food from your hand. Also do not hoard molotovs for a perfect moment; the perfect moment is the next chokepoint.

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Guide reflects the Early Access build as of October 26, 2026. Systems are actively patched; verify current balance against the latest patch notes.