Feature List

About This Game

Inspired by XCOM, Resident Evil, and CONTROL, Critical Shift is a tactical RPG that fuses turn-based squad combat with thrilling real-time exploration. Answer a distress call from ICE-1, a classified research facility buried beneath the Antarctic ice. The station has gone silent – and whatever it is that breached containment cannot be allowed to escape.

• Master deep tactical gameplay

• Experiment with a wide variety of character builds, weapon progression systems, and tools

• Control environments and turn enemies on each other

• Explore and uncover horrifying secrets and paranormal artifacts in an abandoned frozen facility

Every move matters in turn-based combat. Use cover, control distance, and choose the right weapon for the range – rifles dominate from afar, while shotguns excel up close. Move your squad across a tactical grid and think before you act – attacking an enemy provokes an immediate counter-attack, while turn order follows each character's initiative, so every decision is a trade-off. Deploy items and abilities to set traps and scout ahead. Manage resources carefully – every medkit and every bullet is hard to come by.

Manage your squad and the environment they fight in. Build your team from 11 playable agents, each with distinct skills, personality, and a role in the story. Level up your roster, improve weapons, and decide who – and what – to bring on each mission. ICE-1 is swarming with mutants, an AI that creates flesh-and-metal hybrids, desperate survivors, and entities that defy explanation. Make the environment your weapon. Use noise and other distractions to lure enemies into traps or turn them against each other. The choices are all yours across over 30 handcrafted levels with more than 40 hours of gameplay.

Research at ICE-1 went horribly wrong. The facility has gone silent. Communications are down. The experiments created anomalies and paradoxes across time and space and unleashed horrors that were never meant to exist. Time flows faster, a parasitic hive-mind has taken the staff, and the station's security machines hunt anything that moves. The facility stretches for miles beneath the ice, from research chambers and living quarters to technical zones and sealed sectors. Explore richly detailed environments, read notes, listen to conversations, and uncover the mysteries that ICE-1 holds.

Critical Shift is a multi-layered story with plot twists and drama, written in collaboration with Guiltythree, the acclaimed author of the web novel Shadow Slave. Can you save and protect those you care about? Are you fighting the right enemies, or is the real threat coming from elsewhere? Allies may betray you, and enemies may become friends. Experience this gripping, mind-bending sci-fi story in over an hour of stunning 2D hand-painted cutscenes, complemented by more than two hours of motion-captured in-game story scenes.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Critical Shift contains mature content, including depictions of dead bodies, blood, corpses, zombie-like and mutated creatures, paranormal elements, and scenes of armed combat.

The game includes gunfights, tactical violence, injuries, and death as part of its story and gameplay. Some scenes may contain disturbing imagery and references to dangerous experiments, anomalies, and supernatural events.

The game does not contain sexual content, nudity, or sexual violence.