The lab is ruined. Someone adopted the alien.

A hand reaches towards a small, glowing creature. A heart appears above it. In a facility where something has clearly gone very wrong, somebody has found a pet.

That moment, twelve seconds into Abiotic Factor’s official Cosmic Companions showcase, is a good reason to look beyond the guns. There are dangerous things here, but the scientists also have experiments to make, equipment to arrange and creatures to fuss over. The workplace has become somewhere to live.

For your group: this looks most interesting if your friends enjoy making a shared place their own, following strange discoveries and getting distracted by useful or ridiculous projects. The developer describes survival crafting for one to six players, rather than a sequence of combat rounds. A six-person capacity does not make it the same evening as Killing Floor 3.

Familiar objects make the strange bits better

The lab coats do a surprising amount of work. So do the tiled floors, office chairs and fluorescent lights. In the Cold Fusion launch showcase, a scientist still has a clipboard in hand in a familiar-looking corridor. Elsewhere, a railing frames a snowy landscape and machinery opens towards a purple world.

Those ordinary objects give the extraordinary places something to push against. A glowing creature in a fantasy forest is at home. Put it beside a scientist who looks as though they should be checking a form, and the scene becomes much funnier.

The pet sequence develops that contrast. The hand and heart make the interaction immediately legible, before you need to know the creature’s name or what it does. A few shots later, scientists gather around another specimen in a recognisably institutional corridor. The setting still looks like a workplace; its occupants have rewritten the rules.

These are edited promotional sequences from two different releases, not one uninterrupted afternoon. They establish the tone convincingly, while leaving the time between discoveries and the effort of maintaining a base for a longer playtest.

The chemistry bench suggests a different kind of contribution

At 00:28 in Cosmic Companions, the frame fills with coloured reservoirs, pipes and a container beneath a label reading “RESULT.” It looks like an experiment somebody wants you to notice.

LOOK CLOSER

The lab is part of the adventure.

The whole picture

This chemistry station makes the workplace itself interesting. Follow the reservoirs, the marked result area and the bottle in the foreground. The image supports that reading of the equipment, not a recipe or a claim about the bottle’s effects.

DETAIL 01

Colour makes the apparatus readable.

Distinct liquids sit in separate reservoirs above the pipes. Their colour and arrangement make this look like a system with different inputs, rather than a generic workbench.

DETAIL 02

A small label gives the setup a purpose.

The word “RESULT” marks a receiving area below the machinery. It helps a viewer connect the upper reservoirs to an output, even without knowing this particular recipe.

DETAIL 03

The scientist stays in the picture.

A hand, a lab-coat sleeve and the orange bottle occupy the foreground. The equipment is something the character is working with, which keeps the scientist identity present during an ordinary task.

The useful question for a group is whether making things together sounds like part of the entertainment. Would your friends enjoy stopping to examine an apparatus, gathering supplies and discussing what to try? Or would half the party be waiting for the next fight?

The game’s official store description puts scavenging, improvised equipment and building a base at the centre of surviving the facility. That gives the bench context beyond its bright colours. Preparation is part of the proposed activity, rather than merely a pause before it.

I like how the showcase makes this visible without making every scientist look heroic. Its final cleaning scene has someone holding a mop beneath a ceiling covered in mess. The contrast is small and memorable: the disaster can be cosmic, and the floor can still need attention.

Six friends, three very different evenings

In our R.E.P.O. field note, handling an object becomes a problem because its value can fall while the team tries to get it out. Abiotic Factor’s bench and companion scenes invite a different interest: what can we do with the things around us, and what might we want to keep?

Killing Floor 3 is the more direct comparison if everyone chiefly wants a shared firefight. It also accommodates six, but its wave structure gives combat a much clearer place at the centre of the evening. That is a preference distinction, not a difficulty ranking.

If your group includes the friend who always investigates an odd room, the one who likes arranging supplies and the one who gets attached to an unlikely creature, Abiotic Factor belongs on the discussion list. Agree that those diversions are welcome before choosing a survival-crafting game together.

Check the group before entering the facility

Playstack confirms cross-play across the PC and console versions; the supported console releases are PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. That makes it a useful addition to our six-player shortlist.

Use the source details below for the recordings, or compare it with R.E.P.O.. The deciding question is pleasantly specific: do your friends want to escape with a haul, or investigate a workplace strange enough to become their next shared project?