Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - A rogue-like at the end of the world and challenges you to survive

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead is an opensource sandbox 2D, apocalypse survival,horror rogue-like that takes place in the near future where humanity has fallen and you, the player, takes on the role of one of many survivors who still have some remnants of their sanity.

The game gives the player the freedom of choosing how they wish to tackle the new world after a titular Cataclysm has spread and throws earth into disarray.

The approach to survival is open-ended and is only restricted by what the player is willing and, in some cases, what they are forced to do if they wish to survive and thrive in a world that is in a state of chaos as it becomes the locus of many entities vying for control over remains of earth.

The game systems are deep enough to provide multiple solutions to the problems a player is expected to face and rewards understanding of the systems with risks that have the potential to be well rewarded.

The tools available to the player allow one to engage in hunting, gathering, scavenging, looting, crafting and task delegation via NPCs once a permanent base camp is established to get by and advance in their endeavours.

There are a lot of systems in place and can be overwhelming when starting out but once that hurdle is overcome the world is your oyster and how much fun one gets is in the hands of what objectives the player is interested in and how they wish to achieve it.

It has a robust crafting system that gives a player the freedom to engage in a wide variety of crafts from weapons, armours, tool creation, chemistry, gun modification, vehicle construction and general construction tasks.

All these things help with how one can approach the game. Does one find factions and do missions for them for rewards, does one look for clues to the source of the cataclysm, abandon their humanity and embrace the chaos and mutate into one of the various mutation lines, make friends with a cyborg faction and embrace transhumanism to enhance oneself with technology or does one decide that the best use of resources is to create an amphibious super crawler that can act as a mobile base of command.

Enemy variety is diverse with humans and animals subject to a zombification process that turns any corpse, that is not properly pulped, into a "zombie" that evolves over time, humanity being the most diverse group in regards to this and acts as the primary enemy force one encounters any where near civilisation.

There is also having to deal with aliens, otherworldly creatures, transdimensional entities, mutants, sentient plants and fungus and remnants of humanity that choose not to be cooperative with the player - which can be bandits or unsuccessful communication with someone else that escalates to violence.

The game comes bundled with mods as well and it offers new playstyles, modes and a variety of other options that can be added on top of the base game experience. If one would like to read more on the state of this, one can go to the associated wiki here.

The world map is, in essence, infinite and only really limited by the amount of drive space one is willing to allocate to it generating content for one to explore. 

This is also to note that the generation is not only on the surface level as its generation extends both 10 levels above and below the ground level with variety populating both the surface with cities, farms and other staples of modern society and the subterranean world with mines, railway and sewer systems which have the potential to hide secret labs and research facilities.

You are given a sandbox and then told to do what you can to survive and how you do that is in the player's hands and how far they wish to engage with the systems the game provides.

For anyone interested in trying the game, one can download it from this site:

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead Download

It contains the stable and experimental branches

Stable it for the branch that is considered feature stable and systems should work as intended.

Experimental is the latest version is to be downloaded at own risk, here the newest features and tweaks are added regularly and the new stuff has the risk of being overtuned or not as well balanced, but by using it one can exposed to all the zaniness that is being added in all its glory.

Image Source:

CDDA Wiki

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead Lemmy Instance