Independent game development studio Aberratic Studios has announced that a playable demo for Symbiosis, its upcoming sci-fi cooperative hero-shooter, is officially live on Steam. The game aims to blend “fast-paced exploration, tactical base-building, and high-stakes survival” to “deliver a unique hybrid and addictive experience.”
Set in a shifting, procedurally generated alien world, Symbiosis tasks players, either solo or in close cooperation with a partner, with exploring uncharted biomes, establishing robust defensive bases, and evolving their characters to withstand massive, unrelenting waves of mechanical hybrids. Balancing the split-second precision of a hero-shooter with the macro-strategy of a tower defense game, success relies on resource management, base layouts, and harnessing devastating character-specific abilities.
As far as the lore goes, in the far future, the authoritarian Centralized Human Republic (C.H.R.) ordained that every independent colony relinquish total control to their central rule. This tyrannical decree sparked violent pockets of rebellion across the galaxy, filling the Republic’s deep-space penal colonies to maximum capacity.
To manage the endless tide of new inmates, the C.H.R. now offers the most gifted and dangerous prisoners a grim choice: serve out a lifetime sentence in an overcrowded, maximum-security facility, or work off their debt to society as expendable planetary scouts. Players step into the boots of these selected few, dropped onto hostile worlds to reclaim territory lost to catastrophic, abandoned experiments. They must adapt, build, and fight together, or die trying.
Players will need to Defend The Core (their base) against the hundreds of mechanical hybrids invading at night. Develop an intricate layout with rows of walls and turrets. And don’t forget to keep your electrical system up and running. The game offers procedural exploration with a dynamically generated map filled with unpredictable environmental hazards, hidden resources, and aggressive mechanical swarms.
Finally, players will need to choose from a selection of playable heroes, each boasting unique active skill trees designed to complement different tactical playstyles as they team up with a friend in full online cooperative multiplayer, combining base defenses and character abilities to survive the night.
The studio, Aberratic, was co-founded in 2022 by Jonathan Gillard and Jonas Delnaye, both technical artists and high school technical art teachers in Belgium. “Driven by a shared childhood dream, we embarked on creating our own game and universe. We began planning Land of Symbiosis in early 2023 and entered pre-production in January 2024,” said the duo in a press release.