Image: Orsoniks & Oro Interactive

What better way to start your Monday than with a heaping serving of pain? Platform survival sim (and I DO mean 'simulation') Casualties: Unknown has been a growing cult phenomenon since its debut as a free proof-of-concept simply named 'Scav Prototype'. You are an Experiment. A cute fuzzy critter-person mass-produced by an evil corporation as both laborer and test subject. Today, you're being sent into a hostile alien cave system to recover an artifact they accidentally teleported down there. Good luck. You'll need it.

Casualties: Unknown is technically a survival crafting game. It's set in a destructible block-based 2D world that you can run and jump and tunnel through à la Terraria, has multiple biomes to explore, and an assortment of RPG elements. But the actual gameplay couldn't be more different here. You're not a little 16-bit guy who takes 10hp when bumping into a zombie; you're playing as a fully physically simulated creature with inner thoughts and internal organs.

Get cut? You'll want to clean that wound, disinfect and wrap it, then check on it regularly to see if it's healing or feeling unusually hot. Your intensely complex medical UI will tell you a lot of big details (ranging from blood pressure to how hopped up on opioids you are), but your character's own thoughts fill in a lot of the gaps. Learning what threats are, what plants can be eaten, and how to avoid damage while exploring safely is the kind of knowledge you'll build up over time. But for that initial few runs, you're going in blind, and it's going to hurt.

There's something uniquely horrific about this game. Your character is a big-eyed, fluffy-tailed critter just pleading for help, and their pain and fear are made very obvious. It's hard not to get attached and want to protect and help them through their nightmare situation, but it also means that when terrible things do happen, it's going to leave a mental impact too. It's one thing for Leon in Resident Evil to get chainsawed by a zombie, but another to walk a fuzzy lil' guy through having to amputate a limb without anaesthetic as a last-ditch survival play.

And yet it's scarily compelling. There are things on offer here that no other game does. The medical system is involved without being overly fiddly. Intuitive, if you've watched any survival or medical-themed stuff on TV. And now, at least, you can win. Until today's launch, all people had to look forward to in Casualties: Unknown's (extensive) demo was a slow, painful death. There was no victory, and no ending. The launch version (accompanied by an extensive set of patch notes here) finally provides a glimmer of hope, albeit at the end of an underworld twice as deep.

There are now three playable characters, multiple endings, an endless mode (for those who just want to live in the caves), and the map has been extended from 5 to 11 layers deep. When crafting items, you can now customize labelling and colors; there are more items to find and learn to use, and (quite importantly) losing a limb is no longer the end. There are prosthetics available, ranging from awkward stopgaps to advanced cybernetics more powerful than your original flesh.

This is probably going to be slightly more useful, too, as the notes menacingly mention that some traps can cause dismemberment now. Oh dear. I am also slightly unnerved by the line "Attempted to remove Entity" in the patch notes. I guess I'll find out what that means once I've had a chance to dig into this one myself.

Casualties: Unknown is out now for £19/$23, with a 15% launch discount, and more to save if you own one of several cute or survival-focused games, including Abiotic Factor, Barotrauma, Palworld and Rain World. The demo is also still available, and while it hasn't been updated for launch day, it still features almost half of the game and no win condition- just endless suffering.