If you’ve been ignoring this one, the game’s launch trailer (showcased below) might change your mind. If you liked its predecessor, this one is shaping up to be a very potent follow-up to everything that made your time with Nora in her first outing so hauntingly memorable. The story follows her efforts to return to her world after being trapped in a parallel dimension following the first game’s events. She’s essentially alone, although she does make a few friends along the way, and will have to be quite judicious in her use of some cool weapons if she wants to survive a bunch of threats that are looking quite formidable.

Expect to be on the edge of your seats if you decide to dive into this one, and be ready to bring some tactical thinking to the table as you manage your arsenal and inventory in your effort to see Nora through to the end of her adventure. Of course, there’s always the scope for this one to set up another outing for her. We’re quite eager to find out if that’s the case, if we’re being honest.

Irrespective of whether or not that turns out to be true, Industria 2 is shaping up to be a thrilling time on PC. Check out our feature for everything you should know.

With a strong survival horror influence underpinning its immersion, here are fifteen things to know about INDUSTRIA 2.

Game Overview

INDUSTRIA 2 is shaping up to be a tightly focused, narrative-driven first-person shooter that places its bleak, monochromatic atmosphere squarely in the crosshairs. You’ll once again step into the shoes of Nora, a scientist trapped in a surreal parallel dimension. Picking things up after she’s sought refuge in an abandoned location, she ventures out into the post-industrial world for a sequel which appears committed to delivering an introspective, story-led experience. This time around, exploration is poised to carry as much weight as the gunplay itself.

Slow and Methodical

INDUSTRIA 2 is the polar opposite to a run-and-gun shooter. It follows a deliberate, survival horror-like pace, where otherworldly forests, ghost towns, and mechanical factories alike demand patience and solemn observation. Enemies appear entirely robotic, and they’re not always thrown at you in waves. Instead, they’re placed with care, turning every confrontation into a tense exchange. In INDUSTRIA 2, a chaotic approach rarely prevails.

An Unsettlingly Personal Story

INDUSTRIA established the parallel world overruled by rogue AI ATLAS, but common complaints centred on the low emotional stakes in what was a promising premise. As a course correction, this sequel appears to dig deeper into Nora’s past, as it has been revealed that she may have played a significant role in the creation of the very machines that haunt the world she’s stranded in. This revelation should add an air of unsettling accountability to her journey, reframing each encounter as something more personal.

Diegetic Systems Ground Immersion

Immersion is clearly a priority for this sequel – frankly, it is in any game – but in adopting diegetic inventory and crafting systems INDUSTRIA 2 hopes to ground immersion with tangible mechanics. See, rather than pulling you out of the world into abstract menus, these systems – like the inventory scroll she whips out of her backpack – are integrated directly into Nora’s reality. There’s the sense that everything from managing resources to building tools is designed to enforce believability against the preternatural backdrop.

The World is a Post-Industrial Nightmare

Parts of INDUSTRIA 2’s setting lean heavily into post-industrial decay, where sprawling, impossible architecture appears constructed from organic machinery. These locations bring to mind Armored Core’s colossal factories, and perhaps even the biomechanical nightmare of Scorn. It’s a world where towering structures and labyrinthine spaces create unease through their defiance of logic, and we’ve more to say on the bio-horror angle later.

Five Distinct Weapon Types and Craftable Explosives

Combat will revolve around five distinct weapon types, however these don’t appear to be high-end, complex military-grade firearms but the more ramshackle pistols, shotguns, rifles and the like you find in Stalker. Further, each weapon can be upgraded with various attachments – silencers, extended magazines, special firing mods – suggesting a progression system which honours investment and experimentation with numerous possible loadouts. Elsewhere, explosives in the shape of small firebombs are craftable, adding another tactical option when overwhelmed with enemies.

Enhanced Melee

Compared to its predecessor, where clunky pickaxe melee was a common painpoint, INDUSTRIA 2 appears to place greater emphasis on close-quarters combat. That said, melee-only runs don’t seem possible, more that scattered detritus can be grabbed and used in situ – metal pipes, and so on. In the sequel’s Steam demo, melee weapons will break after a few swings. In terms of game design, this ensures found items can be used spontaneously, but not wholly relied upon. Yet, it can erode immersion when something metallic only lasts a few hits before snapping. It’ll be interesting to see how the devs balance this in the finished game.

Bio-Mechanical Horror

The developers have been upfront about the body horror, specifically mentioning robotic and bio-mechanical viscera. While the original INDUSTRIA included unsettling visuals, this sequel sounds like it’s pushing the techno-gore much further, potentially into disturbing territory. Whether it reaches this intensity remains to be seen, but with the sequel exploring numerous decrepit, claustrophobic environments, amplified body horror would certainly mirror the tone.

Powered by Unreal Engine 5

Built in Unreal Engine 5, INDUSTRIA 2 brings a noticeable leap in visual fidelity. Immediately present is the wholesale use of Lumen’s dynamic lighting potential, punctuating the oppressive darkness of industrial interiors with sparse illumination that bounces and reflects believably. Environments are more detailed, textures are rich with weather and decay, and physics-based interactions impart a tactile feel to moving objects, plugging cables, and crafting ammo. Let’s hope INDUSTRIA 2 isn’t plagued by the same performance issues affecting other titles made in UE5, as the shift in visual immersiveness the engine brings is proving dramatic.

A Short, Focused Experience

The first INDUSTRIA had a runtime of four hours, which many, as already alluded to, feel didn’t provide ample-enough time for the narrative to bloom. Well, INDUSTRIA 2 isn’t set to break the mould already set out by its predecessor in campaign length. This one’s slated to run for approximately four-to-six hours. However, the devs have been vocal about acting on feedback, and while the sequel is indeed another short experience, they’re assuring us that it will be a tightly focused, highly curated experience, where brevity works in the narrative’s favour.

Sound Design Is a Core Pillar

Interestingly, the game’s Steam page highlights sound design as a key pillar to the overall experience. We say interesting, as this isn’t something every shooter calls attention too, suggesting INDUSTRIA 2’s immersive-sim elements will dominate over gunplay. Audio, then, will build tension, whether through environmental ambience, mechanical echoes, or ghostlike murmurs hanging in stale air. That said, footsteps, weapon reloading, the sound of Nora’s opening backpack, each of these sounds is sharply polished too, supporting the Steam description’s audio-centric pledge.

Influence Shifts Toward Survival Horror

While the original INDUSTRIA wore it’s Half-Life inspirations openly, all this emphasis on detailed lighting, tactile sound design, and shuffling investigation points to the sequel taking a different route. Evidently, the developers are looking toward modern survival horror to establish the sequel’s aesthetic, explaining its careful mix of exploration and combat to heighten tension, alongside an increased emphasis on scarce ammunition and resource management.

Overhauled Enemy AI

Enemy behaviour has been upgraded for this sequel. Rather than simply reacting to your actions, enemies now inhabit environments befitting of their design – humanoid robots follow patrol routes, mechanical arachnids scurry through dusty burrows, and humans tiptoe with the same trepidation you likely will. However, during a gameplay trailer, whereby the player shoots a room-scanning tripod in earshot of three human explorers, the AI doesn’t showcase behaviour exactly how you’d expect enemies in the vicinity of gunfire to react. However, that footage was taken from gameplay earlier in development. Hopefully, the same situation in the finished game will yield enemies who startle at the pop of gunfire, as less predictable enemies leads to more threatening encounters.

Release Date and Platforms

INDUSTRIA 2 launches on April 15th. On release, it’ll be a PC-exclusive, with Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store currently listing the game for pre-order. Currently, consoles haven’t been officially announced. The first INDUSTRIA saw its console version arrive nine-months after the original launch, so something similar can’t be ruled out here.

PC Requirements

To adequately run INDUSTRIA 2, you’ll need at minimum an Intel i5-8600, AMD Ryzen 5 3600, or equivalent CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or similar GPU, and 8GB RAM. Recommended hardware, as per the game’s Steam page, includes an Intel i7-8700K CPU, GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, and 16GB RAM. The game also requires 20GB storage.

Discussing how disappointed the team is to be announcing the delay, it noted that the team’s journey had begun ten years ago, with many of the developers only working on the project in their free time. The studio has thanked fans for caring so much about the “crazy project we have been working on for years now.”

“Turns out finishing a high fidelity single-player FPS campaign with a team of 8 is hard,” wrote the studio. “We are punching above our weight with this one once again. On one hand, this is exactly why it’s exciting for us and apparently for a lot of people out there. Hearing from players and testers that this game sometimes can feel close to the games that inspired us growing up, like Half-Life, Bioshock, and Resident Evil, is unbelievably beautiful and motivating.”

“On the other hand, it’s sometimes overwhelmingly difficult for our tiny team scattered around the globe to make it fully click without burning out and being able to pay everyone fairly every month. A hard balance between passion and the reality of paying bills that most creatives out there face.”

In the meantime, the studio has decided to placate those looking forward to playing Industria 2 by releasing one of the songs from its soundtrack – Hint of Light – which has been composed by No Bloom Now and could be heard in the game’s teaser trailer.

“We totally get all the potential frustration from the delay. It just needs a little bit more time in the oven. For a small and agile team like ours, these two weeks go a long way,” wrote Bleakmill.

Industria 2 is going to be set two years after the events of the first game, with players taking on the role of returning protagonist Nora, who happens to be trapped in a parallel dimension between machine-built walls. Nora’s journey of trying to get back to her home in 1989 East-Berlin continues, while she makes use of an abandoned chapel near the coast as her base of operations, while exploring the parallel dimension, where she will also have to deal with sinister AI ATLAS.

The title got a trailer focusing on its story back in March 2025, which gave us a look at how it will double down on its predecessor’s horror shooter vibes. We got to see how players will have to sneak around strange monstrosities in a dilapidated building, while also being armed with a shotgun. Resource management seems to be a key aspect of gameplay, since the trailer’s player was hesitant in taking on the enemies.

Bleakmill has said that Industria 2 will focus on immersive gameplay through physics-based interactions with the world around the player. Along with this, there will also be a crafting system, as well as an inventory system that has been described as diegetic. Over the course of the game, players will be able to get their hands on five weapons, each of which can be upgraded with various attachments.

Industria 2 is being developed for PC. For more, check out our review of the original Industria.

Developed by Bleakmill and published by Headup, this one’s an interesting survival horror shooter that puts you in the shoes of Nora, the returning protagonist from the first title, who is grappling with its events while trying to make her way back home to 1989 Berlin. Her efforts are thwarted by ATLAS, a rogue AI that is seemingly connected to the sinister machines and automatons standing between Nora and her goals.

We were quite impressed by the first title’s storytelling and world-building, although we did lament its clunky controls and technical issues in our review. However, the sequel could finally perfect the formula and deliver a better experience as a result. The gameplay loop looks quite ambitious this time around, and it’s a thankfully short while before we can dive in and find out. Although the new trailer doesn’t reveal too much about the game, it’s still worth watching for you to get some context about what’s going on before you dive in.

The trailer indicates that Industria 2 will be doubling down on its predecessor’s horror shooter vibes. A brief look at the gameplay from the start of the trailer shows us the protagonist loading up their shotgun with some shells as they explore a dilapidated building.

In this building, the player has to sneak around some sort of monstrosities. When there are too many of them, the player has to resort to shooting some of them while also trying to escape.

On escaping, the trailer switches to showcase more of the story in Industria 2. The shooter will revolve around protagonist Nora having to figure out a way to get home alongside Marlene. The central question driving the story of Industria 2 will be about the sinister AI ATLAS.

Industria 2 is set two years after the events of the first game. Players take on the role of Nora, who is trapped in a parallel dimension between machine-built walls. While Nora has an abandoned chapel near the coast as her main base of operations, she is trying to figure out a way to get back to her home in 1989 East-Berlin.

Along the way, Nora will have to deal with several obstacles, the least of which will be ATLAS. The game will revolve around Nora coming to terms with her past and having to face the consequences of her previous actions, which are seemingly linked to the creation of ATLAS in some way.

The gameplay in Industria 2 will focus on presenting players with immersive gameplay through the use of physics-based interactions. There will also be a crafting system, as well as an inventory system described by the developers as diegetic. Paired with this will be a unique setting that features industrial decay and a boreal landscape, complete with otherworldly structures and creatures.

As part of the game’s crafting system, players will also be able to upgrade their arsenal of five weapons. These upgrades come in the form of various attachments, like extended magazines, silencers, or even more unique attachments that provide special attacks.

The studio has noted that, while Industria 2 will feature a core narrative that players can follow, it will be light on cutscenes. The title, inspired by the storytelling techniques of seminal shooter Half-Life 2, will feature in-game cutscenes that present the story will still giving players plenty of freedom.

Industria 2 is being developed for PC and is slated for release in 2025. As its name might imply, the title is a follow-up to 2022’s Industria.

We reviewed the original Industria on the Xbox Series X/S, giving it a score of 6 out of 10. While we praised the title’s storytelling and world building, as well as its visuals and atmosphere, the cumbersome movement, dull combat, as well as an array of technical issues were problems.

Set in the late 1980s just before the end of the Cold War, Industria sees you playing as a woman named Nora. Awoken by a call from her close friend and colleague Walter, she is informed that ATLAS – a hive mind AI that the two of them have worked on together – has gone haywire somehow. Instantly, she sets off to their place of work to find and help Walter, but upon arriving, she quickly realizes that things are worse than expected. One thing leads to another, and Nora soon finds herself in a parallel world, separated from her own in ways she doesn’t understand. This world, she quickly realizes, is decrepit and abandoned, inhabited by almost no one and nothing except creepy machines and automatons who are hostile to the point of attacking anyone they lay eyes on.

"As flawed and rough around the edges as it is, it feels ambitious and unique, in a way that I feel deserves praise, not least because this is a game made by just two people, and because it’s a breed of first person shooter that has become increasingly rare as time has gone by."

Industria’s world and story are easily its biggest strengths. The vibe and aesthetic are excellently realized, combining 1980s lo-fi with steampunk and new weird aesthetics, to concoct something that feels wholly unique. From the very first second, Industria pulled me right into its setting, and the more I played it, the more I was drawn in. It’s also a game that’s very good at raising questions and presenting tantalizing mysteries, and encouraging you to slowly piece things together by dropping bits and pieces of lore and story. It’s all done very well, and it helps immensely that the narrative-related discoveries you do make are interesting to varying degrees. Even if the stuff you’re uncovering can be generic at times for the kind of story this is, it’s the way you discover it and the way Industria presents its story and its world that makes it all so interesting.

Visually, too, this is an impressive game. Obviously, this is a small production, made by a small team on what is clearly a tight budget, so you absolutely shouldn’t go in expecting anything close to a technical masterpiece. What this is, however, is a visually crisp game. Environments are surprisingly detailed, the art style is excellent and contributes significantly to bringing the game’s world to life, and the locations you traverse and explore and the enemies you fight are brought to life to great effect. Serviceable on a technical level and impressive on an artistic one- that seems to be the best way to describe Industria’s visuals.

Sadly, while there’s plenty to be impressed by when it comes to Industria’s world, narrative, and storytelling, when it comes to actually playing the game, the bad outweighs the good by quite some margin. Structurally, Industria takes a page out of the original Half-Life’s book, combining deliberately paced exploration with puzzle-solving and some combat, along with a few survival horror elements thrown in for good measure. Almost none of those many disparate elements is very well implemented in practice though.

"Industria’s world and story are easily its biggest strengths."

Combat feels sloppy and unimpactful. None of Industria’s weapons have too much weight to them, the feedback after firing a shot feels almost non-existent, and it doesn’t help that enemies don’t react too satisfyingly to being hit, even if it’s a lethal shot. Puzzles, meanwhile, fare far better, and simply walking about the environments and figuring out where to head next, what to do next, or how to do what you’re supposed to do next can occasionally be fun- but a lot of the time, the stuff you’re supposed to do is pretty straightforward, while every once in a while, it feels a bit too obtuse, especially when the game frustratingly decides to give you next to no assistance.

Where Industria really stumbles, however, is its movement. The simple act of moving around and interacting with the environment feels like a chore- and that’s never good. Movement feels clunky and cumbersome, which is exacerbated by the fact that, for some reason, you can’t move diagonally in this game. It’s just four directions, and that’s something that quickly gets grating, especially in combat encounters. Often, you’re required to jump up over obstacles or across ledges to move forward, and that, too, can feel incredibly frustrating, because the height of your jump in Industria is pathetically minute, which means you often have to get weirdly precise with the placement of things that you’re using as steps to move upward and forward.

A lot of the game also revolves around looking at specific things and interacting with them by pressing a button, but the game demands very precise and specific aiming, which just doesn’t gel well with its sluggish controls and movement at all. Then there’s crouching, which is done by holding the stick that is also used for movement. As you might image, crouching while moving (which you do every once in a while) becomes quite unwieldy. That’s doubly true for occasions where you have to to interact with something while crouching. Movement and moment-to-moment gameplay feels sluggish and awkward in Industria, then, and that impacts nearly every aspect of the game. It’s a big issue, to say the very least.

"Movement and moment-to-moment gameplay feels sluggish and awkward in Industria, then, and that impacts nearly every aspect of the game. It’s a big issue, to say the very least."

Industria has some technical issues as well. In the time I spent with the game, I ran into a few audio and graphical bugs, like dialogue lines cutting out before they could be finished, some wonky physics for objects, and one crash that froze my game and forced me to restart it. I was playing the game on Normal difficulty, which means I had autosaves enabled, so thankfully I didn’t lose a great deal of progress- but if you play on Hardcore, where manual saving is the only way to save your progress, crashes could be a bigger issue.

Industria is a wildly imperfect game. It has significant issues in areas that affect nearly the entire experience, and get in the way of enjoyment in ways that aren’t easy to ignore. When the simple act of moving around isn’t fun and the core gameplay pillars are serviceable at best and dull at worst, you know the game has issues. And yet, even so, I have enjoyed my time with this game. Industria is fairly short at around four hours in length, and though I have been left frustrated with its gameplay deficiencies more than a few times, I can’t help but acknowledge its obvious strengths in atmosphere, storytelling, and world-building. My recommendation here comes with some clear and very significant caveats- but it is still a recommendation. As it exists right now, Industria is a very rough but solid experience. With a bit more polish and time in the oven, it could have been so much more.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.