horse(s): unknown (CAS:U)

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casualties: unknown, or CAS:U, is a brutal cave exploration game. from the itch.io page and steam:
 

Descend into the depths of the Target Planet's cave network to retrieve a critical piece of cargo, encountering many horrifying obstacles and problems on the way, to your character's dismay. Survival chances are near 0%—expect to die a lot along the way.
Caution and patience are greatly rewarded in the depths. Any mistake can spiral into an ugly, permanent death.

Casualties: Unknown is an unforgiving cave-exploration survival simulator. Your captors have tasked you with retrieving lost cargo on a foreign planet, explore its 11 layers and do your best to survive diverse hostile environments. You are just one of the thousands of test subjects sent to die.

there is an incredibly in-depth health system - complete with limb health and simulated cardiovascular system to keep track of, many layers to try and survive to descend with increasing danger and hazards, and very cute little fellas you get to guide down to their inevitable horrible demises. you play as an experiment, or as theyre more commonly called, an expie: small, genetically engineered hybrids of rat, human, and canidae / fox DNA. bred and  deployed by your captors just for cave retrieval, youre also cute, highly emotional, and conflict averse. you talk out loud to yourself as you go down... which is a habit retained from tests in the lab, to track your cognition. its become a comfort, in a way.

the company that made you also implanted a brain chip into you, the ones before you, and the ones who will come after. it lets you monitor your vitals in realtime, but its also a remote leash. take too long, and radiation will force you to move faster down. give up, and... well.

i am going to try so, so, so hard.

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since this is a game where so much can go wrong SO, SO FAST, this game is not for the faint of heart. it is chock full of terrible things happening to cute little furries, and it is not avoidable. you can censor pain (your expies will not whine) and self harm content, but even with this, cas:u is a very intense game by its very nature. crises can spring up literally at any possible second, and there will be times all you can do is helplessly watch until the end arrives.


this is by no means ehxaustive, but some content warnings include:

• physical violence & gore: graphic body horror, limb dismemberment (self amputation or otherwise), intense bodily injuries, decapitation, and characters dying incredibly slowly from severe blood loss, trauma, or infection, and self surgeries or things like resetting dislocated limbs or pulling out shrapnel; your expie narrates to themself out loud the entire time youre exploring, which includes them in pain or very, very scared
  
• insects, spiders, and other crawlies: giant arachnids, swarming bugs, and subterranian creatures as early as the first layer (but becoming particularly aggro around layer three); some outright chase and hunt you down or rip limbs off
  
• flashing lights / eyestrain: sudden pain can cause a bright strobe, as well as harsh lighting and glitch effects; suffering severe brain damage / hypoxia can cause flashes or "seizures" - a sudden loud noise followed by bright flash, colour shift, and the current screen burning in for a few seconds before slowly fading. additional things brain damage can do include flipping the screen every few seconds and severe visual shaking
  
• loud noises and auditory warnings: heartbeat sounds, gore noises, medical system beeping, loud creatures, environmental sounds, and harsh sudden tones in the music (namely the pain music and severe depression / death music); being severely depressed may trigger a loud harsh warning tone before a certain minigame is triggered
  
• depression, self harm, and suicide: if your expies mood gets too low, they can resist healing items, ignore you trying to tell you to do things, and at their absolute worst may self injure or try to end their life. if not censored, and your mood is too low, a warning ring will trigger before an unavoidable self injury scene occurs. if censored, your expie will vomit instead. if their mood continues to drop, they will do worse until they bleed out; if they have a gun, even without any ammo in it, they will utilize it (this can technically be avoided if you are fast enough and keep in motion, i believe ?). if censored, they will go into cardiac arrest instead. depression and suicide are treated incredibly frankly and raw + real in this game in a way that hits with me personally, but may be VERY triggering for other people
  
• general distress and hopelessness: themes of forced labor, captivity, abuse, extreme claustrophobia, isolation, and total helplessness; given that you play as test subjects with no hope of rescue. narrow tunnels and scarce resources can lead to compounding catastrophes wherein a single mistake can cost you massively. 
  
• substance use / abuse + forced medication: you kind of have to pump expies full of pain meds, strange stimulants, and other things to keep them alive and moving. they can become addicted to opiates and suffer fatal withdrawal if bad enough.
  
• suffocation & drowning: theres environmental hazards of water or oil and such. it is very easy to end up trapped in these if things go south.
  
• other medical situations: heat / cold hazards like frost bite or heat stroke, plain old strokes, and so on, including severe panic or garbled speech from brain damage; any possible injury or illness is graphically depicted, including moodles + the health panel so you can watch precisely what is happening as your expie deteriorates.. or as you try to rescue them !!
  

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im making this LP thread because id really really like to properly learn this game. the furthest ive gotten thus far is early layer 2. i want to get as far as the demo will allow.. and get to know the game deeper before its proper release.

for the first several runs, i am going to play on relaxed and allow myself to pump the environmental brightness up, because getting fucked over early with no light makes recovering from situations incredibly hard. its a challenge i dont dislike, but again, i want to learn this game properly and being able to see will help quite a bit, lmao. the first run or two will be vanilla, but after i will try including the QoL unknown mod out :0)

i will also do my best to include alt text for screenshots included.

ill be documenting these runs as i do them. and in turn, ill be documenting the lives of the little dudes i try very hard to guide down. a treasured few may become ocs or something. we'll see....! with that...

welcome to the gray planet.