Space is cold, lonely, and wholly apathetic to the struggles of humanity. That inhospitality gives Halfway its emotive essence. It doesn’t ask you to conquer, to win, or to triumph. Here, on a bent and broken ship aimlessly drifting through the infinite dark, you’re just trying to survive. Halfway opens with Lannis, an aging security guard for the Goliath colony ship, coming out of stasis quite a bit later than he expected. Immediately it’s clear, both in the environments and the steady, solemn tones driving the ambient sound track, that this is not a happy story.

The lead into the more omnipresent feeling of dread is slow at first. Peeking and probing, you search about the first few areas of the ship, seeking other survivors. Even after establishing a rudimentary basecamp, the seemingly endless hordes of mutated crew members are an evolving and lingering threat. From your base, you launch missions with a growing group of survivors to gather needed food and supplies and ultimately take back the ship.

Unlike with similar games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Fire Emblem, death is not permanent, and though Halfway’s message still resonates, the music and visuals are what properly express the game's thematic weight. Seeing a crewmate that barely survived your last mission gently pulling drags from a cigar as he looks out over the stars carries with it great emotion. Rooms are littered with the pieces of stories told in times past. Bullet holes, shell casings, and piles of ashes set the grim tone and remind you that your characters that they may not survive for much longer.

The morose tone is further darkened by a stellar soundtrack. The main theme kicks in with hard synth beats that evoke the era of science-fiction classics like Alien and Blade Runner before shifting into wistful, distant chords. Each battle theme is a faster, layered version of the same area's ambient music. This musical consistency establishes a constant sense of place and provides an extra bump of adrenaline for making action sequences feel exciting and important. The menu and home base tracks lack combat variants altogether, expressing the somber state of affairs and depicting how distant even the slightest hope for survival seems.

Halfway's environments, writing, and musical score convey a sense of quiet perseverance, but the gameplay doesn't communicate that feeling as clearly as it should. Persistent characters help give the adventure grounding, but Halfway doesn’t have the conviction to make its subjects mortal. Yet there's something to be said for the way in which this foreboding game uses style to convey substance, pushing you from one battle to the next so that you might shed light on a chilling galactic mystery.