This is a medium-long campaign best enjoyed over several weeks. Finishing the story, building a solid base, and seeing a good mix of portal worlds will usually take 40–60 hours, depending on how much you wander. Sessions themselves are naturally on the longer side: an ideal night is 60–120 minutes so you can run a portal, clear part of a sector, and tidy your base before stopping. Frequent autosaves and full pause in solo play make it possible to handle real-life interruptions, but long objectives and co-op sessions can still sprawl. Picking the game back up after a break usually means a short reorientation tour of your base and quest log, especially if you juggle several games at once. Co-op adds another layer of commitment: it’s at its best when you and friends can keep a loose weekly schedule. Overall, it’s a great “main game” rather than something you just dip into occasionally.

Abiotic Factor wants a decent amount of your attention. In a typical session you’re tracking survival needs, watching your surroundings, and planning what to craft or where to explore next. Combat happens in real time, but enemies usually telegraph attacks and you have space to think, so it’s more about staying aware than about razor-sharp reactions. The game also spends plenty of time in menus and at your base, sorting inventory, setting up power, and queuing construction, which pulls things toward a more thoughtful, planning-heavy feel. This isn’t a great choice if you want to half-watch a show or listen to a complex podcast, because stepping away during expeditions can lead to surprise damage or missed cues. But it also isn’t a constant barrage of action; downtime at base gives your brain little breaks. Overall, expect to be mentally “on” most of the time, without the exhausting pace of a twitch shooter.

Abiotic Factor takes a little while to learn but doesn’t demand obsessive practice. The first several evenings can feel busy as you figure out how survival meters work, which benches handle which recipes, and what the various portal rules and class perks actually do. If you’ve played other survival-crafting games you’ll adapt quicker, but new players should expect a gentle learning curve over 8–15 hours rather than instant comfort. As you gain experience, your runs become noticeably smoother: you’ll know efficient routes, how to stage supplies, and how to tackle sectors that once felt impossible. Getting better saves time, reduces panic, and lets you take on higher difficulties if you want extra spice. But the game isn’t built around climbing a competitive ladder or mastering frame-perfect combat. You’ll feel rewarded for understanding its systems, yet you won’t feel like you must grind skills for dozens of hours just to enjoy the story.

The overall mood sits in the middle: tense and sometimes spooky, but rarely overwhelming. On default settings, enemies can do serious damage and death has real consequences, so new areas and portal runs come with genuine nerves. Dark corridors, sudden ambushes, and the risk of losing hard-won loot will give you a few heart-in-throat moments each week. At the same time, the game breaks that tension with stretches of safe base work, goofy physics, and sharp humor about corporate science gone wrong. Because you can adjust enemy toughness and death penalties, you have a lot of control over how punishing things feel. Turn the knobs down and it becomes more of a relaxed adventure with occasional scares; crank them up and it edges toward survival horror. For a busy adult, it lands in that satisfying zone where you care about staying alive and protecting your stuff, but you’re not constantly stressed out.