INDUSTRIA 2

Turning a minor FPS hit into a survival-horror seque

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There’s a reason the first Industria ends so abruptly. Inspired by the post-Soviet aesthetic and physics-based puzzles of Half-Life 2, Bleakmill’s debut was initially going to be separated into shorter, successive episodes — also in the style of Valve’s shooter. But David Jungnickel and Steve Chapman, the studio’s founders and the core of its small development team, decided there was enough material to justify a complete, standalone release. It just meant packing all the narrative payoff into one sequence. “We messed up a little with the ending of the game,” Jungnickel says. “You get a lot of information, very fast.”

While not a big hit (“It’s a seven out of ten, you know?” Jungnickel says), if you played Industria in 2021, you'd have sensed that Bleakmill was onto something. It felt like the debut of an imaginative new studio. Industria 2 characterises how Bleakmill’s approach to games has changed since 2021.

While strictly speaking Industria 2 is an FPS, it has more in common with Alien: Isolation, Resident Evil 7 and the wider Frictional oeuvre than with Half-Life or Doom.