From Zenless Zone Zero to The First Descendant , we seem to be experiencing a free-to-play explosion. Despair, ye time-constrained adults, for your carefully engineered shortage of pocket money offers no bulwark against the onslaught of games that want a slice of your evening or weekend. Today's big release, Once Human, at least features a giant schoolbus on monster legs, together with a less exciting but customisable van that just has wheels.
In this open world survival shooter, you are a "Meta-Human" making your way around a landscape corrupted by Stardust, which has warped the scenery and will slowly drive you nuts. You'll get to chop down trees, build bases and craft/obtain weapons of colour-coded rarities. It's a familiar blend, but I'm intrigued by the touches of Control-esque and Ghostwire-adjacent monster and level design in the trailers.
I'm going to try the game out this evening. I'm hoping it'll be a bit like The Division 2's Dark Zones but New Weird. On which note, developers Starry Studio have done a launch FAQ in advance of the probably inevitable release day bugs.
Let me pack it down for you: at launch, you only get one character per account. Once Human is cross-platform, but not on Steam accounts, for the moment, "due to their inherent limitations"; the developers suggest using NetEase's Loading Bay launcher instead, which I don't have much experience with myself. The game also doesn't officially run on Steam Deck right now.
More vexingly, it doesn't yet suppo.