Developed by RexLabo alongside publisher PARCO GAMES, Nova Antarctica is a survival game set against the unforgiving backdrop of a post-apocalyptic Antarctica. As the studio’s debut title, it tackles a challenging genre and introduces several interesting ideas, though not all of them land successfully. This review focuses on the PC Steam version of Nova Antarctica, where players craft essential tools, manage limited resources, and attempt to survive relentless Antarctic blizzards while uncovering a mysterious signal from the South Pole.
As you may have guessed by its name, Nova Antarctica is set in Antarctica, where you play as a nameless character. The game begins with you arriving here on a boat with one mission, reach the South Pole from where a strange signal is coming from. The whole planet earth has been wiped out by different human creations like wars, lethal viruses, food scarcity, extreme weathers and everything else that you can think of. As soon as the game begins, you start seeing remains of people in the area, such as empty boxes, vehicles, and rusting structures.
The game opens with a tutorial that does a poor job of preparing players for what lies ahead. While it introduces the crafting system, it fails to clearly explain how essential and demanding it becomes later on. Nearly every action in Nova Antarctica requires resources, including meeting basic survival needs, and there are no pre-built items to scavenge and reuse. Everything collected in the world is immediately broken down into raw crafting components, making crafting mandatory rather than optional.
My first playthrough ended quickly after a series of harsh weather events left little time to gather supplies or prepare properly. Even food items cannot be consumed directly and must first be crafted into usable meals, which adds to the pressure early on. Dying sends you back to the very start of the game, reinforcing its unforgiving nature. Storytelling is handled almost entirely through static, text-based cutscenes at key moments, with minimal environmental or lore-driven narrative to support the journey.
For your survival, you have to worry about two main aspects: stamina and your battery pack, which has your life support systems. Since you are wearing a full-body suit to protect yourself from the elements, this is a vital piece of technology. It has a limited energy, which keeps draining, and as you move around, climb on boxes, and mine for ore, your stamina declines as well. To restore them, you need to find resources and craft two different items. One restores your stamina while the other one restores your backpack’s energy. If this drops to zero, you die immediately.
During normal weather conditions, this consumption is fairly slow, but if you are caught outside in a blizzard or a radioactive storm, this is drained at an alarmingly fast rate. To counter, you can craft some useful items, such as a fire pit and a tent, to stay inside. Heat actually refills this energy, so it is a two-in-one package for you. However, this is where the gameplay starts getting a little complicated. I have played many survival games where crafting is an essential component of the game; however, here, while it is vital, its implementation is not up to the mark.
To place an item, first press I to open your inventory and go to its icon. The first crafting is done here. Once it is ready, it is added to your backpack inventory. To place it down, you then have to exit the inventory, press B to enter build mode, and then choose a location and put it there. This is for items that are assigned to your radial wheel. Only one item in each category can be assigned at a time. For example, after creating a tent, I need to place it down, and it is not assigned to the radial wheel, so I must press 1 and then Q while holding my mouse over the tent icon. This gives me the option to further see which types of tents are available, and then I will have it assigned to the radial wheel. Once done, I will build it again in the world from the build menu.
This is quite a tedious process because it works the same for healing items, too. To consume an item, you have to press and hold U, but only one healing item is equipped at a time, so if a blizzard arrives and you have the Stamina boost equipped, you will need to navigate through menus, assign the battery booster, and then use it. The game does not pause during these sequences or cutscenes, making it worse. This is one of the strangest forms of crafting that I have ever seen in any video game. The navigation through menus just to place down a tent seems pointless. This seems odd because in every other aspect, the game dumbs down complex processes. For example, picking an object automatically converts it into a raw form resource. Building itself is fairly simple and easy. But the two-step crafting process, in which you must create in the inventory and then build in the real-world does not make sense at all.
The visual design, world-building, and sound design are easily the strongest aspects of the game. The art style of Nova Antarctica is great, and some locations look beautiful. The wildlife in the game looks very cute, and the level design is gorgeous as well. The different landscapes offer an excellent semi-open world for you to explore. The accompanying sound is soothing and is well-incorporated into the game. The visuals look like a mixture of hand-drawn and CGI, delivering a unique experience.
While it is not evident during gameplay, the game features different endings, and these endings are unlocked based on what technology you unlock on your journey. This adds to the game’s replayability, allowing players to experience different outcomes and progression paths in subsequent playthroughs. These are based on your previous adventure’s unlocked technology as well. Each time you unlock a different set of machines, you will reach a different ending. Since resources are scarce, you can only go for a limited number of machines each time, so your choices affect the ending you reach.
The biggest issue facing Nova Antarctica is its inconsistency in survival difficulty. At times, the game feels forgiving, while at others it becomes overwhelmingly punishing, particularly due to the unpredictable weather system. Back-to-back blizzards and radioactive storms leave little room for recovery, and some crafted survival items inexplicably disappear shortly after being placed. As resources become scarcer later in the game and hazards increase, maintaining even basic survival needs becomes increasingly difficult, often feeling more frustrating than challenging.
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Final Verdict:
Nova Antarctica delivers strong visuals and a compelling concept, but uneven execution holds it back. Crafting, meant to be a core mechanic, feels poorly integrated and often more tedious than rewarding, while the weak tutorial leaves key systems underexplained. Still, the game’s cozy atmosphere and occasional story highlights help balance out its rough edges. For players who enjoy exploring harsh, post-apocalyptic worlds and don’t mind some undercooked mechanics, Nova Antarctica offers a decent survival experience that falls short of its full potential.
Final Score: 7.0
Disclaimer: A PC Steam review code for Nova Antarctica was provided by Renaissance PR through PressEngine on behalf of PARCO GAMES. Read our Review Policy.
