Alright. 1 Bit Survivor is done and dusted. The game and its premise are pretty simple. You play as a survivor of a viral outbreak that wipes out humanity and leaves mutants in its wake. In 28 days, the surviving government will carpet bomb the world to destroy the mutants. You are about to just give up and die when you find a cat, and now your life has purpose again. There is a bunker 28 days away. You have just enough time to escort the cat to safety before the bombs drop.

And so you basically have four weeks where four levels, each with 7 sub levels. Each map will have gasoline required to power your car and get to the next sub level, level, week. There are also health and ammo refills in crates, and one crate per week which gives you upgrade materials. At the end of each week, you’ll be given the choice between two random upgrades, which might be increased health, increased ammo, better damage, the ability to destroy walls, knock back enemies, or see the entire map.

With that in mind, this is a turn based puzzle game at its heart, where every time you move, all the enemies move afterwards. Rinse and repeat. You have a pistol for ranged attacks and a knife for melee (resolved by bump combat). As mentioned, your goal is to fuel up your car in each area without dying.

And that’s it. The graphics are of course 1 Bit and are very cool looking despite the limited size and scope of each area. The soundtrack is game appropriate as is the sound design. A single run can be concluded in +/- 30 minutes.

Once you conclude a run with the Survivor, it unlocks a new character with different firearm and lowered stats, and concluding a run as that character unlocks the third character with a new new weapon. Those are basically challenge runs for people who really enjoyed the base experience. There are also leaderboards for those interested. As of the writing, it appears that around 140 players have finished the base game, so your pool for competition will be somewhat limited.

1 Bit Survivor was fully Steam Deck compatible.

I do have one further note: you can skip a turn by holding down the Y button. This specific tactic will be incredibly important in being able to finish the game.

Anyway, fun game. I think cost vs value is there. Worth a look for sure.