Aeternum Infecti

Aeternum Infecti drops players into the immediate aftermath of a global collapse — playing as a survivor named Marlo, one week after society fell apart, scavenging apartments and streets for food, medicine and weapons while the infected close in. It's built for both flat-screen and VR play, launched into Early Access on 24 July, and its early reception is genuinely rough: 5 of its first 13 reviews recommend it. This review read every single one of its seven English-language reviews — a small enough sample to cover completely — and found something specific worth reporting before treating that number as the final word.

A review sample that's already out of date

Every one of this game's English-language reviews is dated between 24 and 26 July — the game's first three days on the market. That timing matters, because this review also checked the developer's own patch notes from that exact window, and the match between what reviewers describe and what got fixed is remarkably precise.

One reviewer describes a specific, disorienting bug: "can't even grab a pistol off my hip, each time it grows in size. First its about the size of a car, then a house." A separate reviewer, playing in VR, describes a related issue with a drawer: "I grabbed the handle to close the drawer and a pistol clip popped up where the pistol was... let's see how much I can stock up on," treating what reads as an item-duplication bug almost as a discovery. The developer's "Update Notes July 25" post, published the same day as the first of those reviews, lists two fixes that match precisely: "Fixed an issue where weapons taken from drawers could sometimes appear at an incorrect size" and "Fixed an issue where drawers could spawn unlimited items when loading a save for the first time."

A third reviewer, also playing in VR, reports a different but related problem: "in VR, when I was inside I saw everything double." A follow-up "VR Update," posted 28 July, lists a fix for exactly that: "Fixed the ghosting/shadowing issue, resulting in a much clearer image," alongside an increase to the "grab area for guns, melee weapons, and other interactable items, making them much easier to pick up" — addressing a separate complaint about struggling to grab items at all. Read together, this isn't a case of a developer sitting on known problems. It's a review sample that was, for the most part, already being resolved in the background while it was being written.

What's worth knowing regardless of timing

Some complaints in the sample are less about specific bugs and more about clarity, and those are worth passing on plainly since they may still apply. One reviewer reports genuine confusion about the game's VR requirements: "VR Supported? or is this a VR only? it will not load the game in non-VR for me not sure why." The store page lists the game under "VR Supported" rather than a VR-exclusive category, so that reviewer's specific experience is worth flagging as a real onboarding question a new buyer might also hit. Another reviewer describes basic controls as unclear, including uncertainty over how to actually fire a weapon, with no visible way to check keybindings.

What comes through clearly on the positive side is real interest in the underlying design. "The fact that I can enter every floor of every building shows the developers are heading in the right direction," reads one recommend, adding they were expecting rough edges from an Early Access title and found the story engaging regardless. Even several negative reviews extend real goodwill: "I feel bad giving this a negative review, but this doesn't even feel like an early access game, more like an alpha build," reads one, going on to specifically credit an "interesting" story despite everything else.

Final verdict

Aeternum Infecti's current Steam score reflects a genuinely rough first few days, and this review isn't going to pretend otherwise — the bugs reviewers describe were real. But this review also found direct, dated evidence that the developer moved fast: two patches within days, targeting several of the exact issues in a review sample that, taken as a whole, mostly describes a build that no longer exists in the form it was reviewed. That's a meaningfully different situation than a studio letting launch problems sit.

Too early to recommend with real confidence either way — the ambition in the open-world design and the setting is genuine, and so were the launch bugs, but this is a case where checking current reviews before buying matters more than usual.

Players who want that same tense, scavenge-to-survive premise built on a much more established, persistent foundation rather than a days-old Early Access build, may also want to look at Wanderer.