Alien: Rogue Incursion is coming on December 19 for the virtual reality headsets, and my preview of the game confirms that it’s going to make me jump out of my headset. That happened to me when I was an alien landed on my face.
Survios, a veteran VR studio that made the Creed boxing games and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, is making the original Alien game. Chief product officer TQ Jefferson showed me multiple scenes in a preview with the Meta Quest 3. The game (available for preorder) is also going to be available on the PlayStation VR2 and PCVR via Steam.
It is another example of the lucrative collaboration between Hollywood and games. (We’re going to have an event on this subject on December 12: GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games).
The single-player, action-horror VR game developed in collaboration with 20th Century Games features a terrifying original Alien storyline starring fan-favorite character and rogue Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks, voiced by Emmy Award winner Andia Winslow.
Fans will suit up in VR as Zula, who comes from the Alien comic books, and fight of the terror of the iconic Xenomorphs in all of their forms. Alien: Romulus, another movie in the long-running series, hit theaters in August.
The scenery of fear
Some of the scenes of the ship just look amazing in terms of creating the right scary mood for a spaceship that has been taken over by Xenomorphs. It oddly reminds me of the recent Dead Space remake, though with different colors. (Of course, Dead Space used Alien as one of its inspirations).
There’s smoke from fires, steam from busted valves, and wreckage all over the corridors. It’s dark with the occasional flickering light, and you have to activate your flashlight. If you want to create the atmosphere where frightening Xenomorphs can jump you out of nowhere, this is it.
My encounter with a facehugger
To show me how visceral the game is, Jefferson dropped me into a nest. Then the nearby eggs start to open.
Fortunately, you have a revolver with six shots in it. It’s in your hand, which is free, but you are tied down with some kind of gooey webbing. You’re stuck. You are in communication with Davis, your combat synth companion, who is trying to reach you over the radio.
Then, small aliens, or facehuggers, start walking around and making their way to me. You can shoot them, but don’t miss, as there are more than one coming at you. Once they reach you, the spider-and-scorpion-like creatures wrap their long legs around your head and glue themselves to your face.
Then they stick a tube down your throat and implant an embryonic alien, dubbed a chest burster, into the host. The baby alien absorbs nutrients from the host, breaking it down and forming new compounds. Somehow, these aliens have acid for blood. When they’re big enough, about a day later, they simply bust out of your chest in a bloody mess. So when the facehugger landed on my face, I was not so happy.
Inside VR, this is a pretty horrifying experience. Jefferson walked me through the demo, guiding me at each moment. And he let me know some of the design decisions that the team made along the way. As such, the preview was a very educational way for me to understand the design of a VR game.
Fortunately, I managed to prolong my life. I had a plasma torch in my gear and pulled it out with my free hand. Then I used it to cut the webbing that held me in place. As I crawled away, I moved past another impregnated human. He started screaming and his chest burst open, and a little alien crawled away. I was thinking that this guy had a worse day than me.
Getting used to the interface
To crawl further, I had to reach out with my hands and squeeze the trigger of the controller and then pull myself forward.
The interface is familiar for VR shooter players. Rather than doing everything with a two-hand game controller in your hands, you have a controller with motion detectors in both hands. You have to physically do things like reload your gun by making motions that the headset detects.
To reload a gun, you reach for your bullets and slip its shell into a shotgun that you’re holding in one hand.
The physical work can get tiring, but that’s the good thing about VR compared to playing games on a couch. You can cheat a little on the movement by reaching for something and indicating you want it and it will move into your grasp. Then you bring it to your chest, where you have a box of things strapped to your body, and it moves into your inventory.
Reloading your gun means you have to pick up shells, grab one of them, and push it into the slot on your weapon. Then you pump the gun with your left hand. You can look at your hands to see what kind of gear you’re carrying. If you’re carrying too much, you have to drop something. All of this is hard to remember in terms of the right gesture, so you have to master it sometime during the start of the game. To turn on your flashlight, you have to reach with your left hand to your left shoulder and squeeze the hand controller trigger.
Shotgun play
In another scene, Jefferson put me into a place where I could grab a shotgun that Davis left behind. I picked it up and looked at it. Much like other guns in VR, if you use it hip style, your gunfire will spray in an unexpected direction.
You have to aim down the sites to make sure you have a Xenomorph in your gunsight, or you may miss and that means death. It takes more than one shot to much of the time to bring one down, and that means you’re run out of shells if you’re facing more than one Xenomorph at a time. If you drop a shell while loading it, heaven help you. In between shots, you have to remember to pump the gun physically with your hands to reload. You can do a one-hand pump, like Sarah Connor did in The Terminator films.
My greatest worry was that two Xenomorphs would attack me at once from different directions. The scary part is that they can come from anywhere, bursting from a ceiling duct or blasting through a wall. They can blend into a wall, or hide in a pool of water. They attack and if they’re forced to retreat, it’s hard to locate them again. This makes things like the simple act of catching an elevator terrifying.
Fortunately, my shotgun could carry eight shells. I could theoretically use it to stagger one Xenomorph and then go after the second one, and then return to the injured Xenomorph to finish it off, and even physically pull out my revolver (holstered on my right leg) for a finishing shot without reloading. You also have to worry about the aliens ganging up on you to trick you, like the raptors behaved in Jurassic Park. You have to outwit the aliens to survive in Alien: Rogue Incursion.
“We deliberately made them tough,” Jefferson said. “We want to make sure that when you were face to face with a Xenomorph, it felt as real and unnerving and everything you would imagine.”
Thanks a lot. Even if I had the shotgun, it takes me so long to remember how to load shells into it that I would just get attacked while I was slowly trying to reload my weapon. I think there should be a tutorial that tells you to master this skill so that you can be fast at reloading. We’re all a bit too accustomed to the notion of a Call of Duty reload, where you press a button on the controller and the reload happens at maximum speed. The first couple of times I played with the shotgun, I did a lot of panic shooting.
Besides the revolver and the shotgun, you can also use an M41A pulse rifle, which carries 99 shells. (Yay!). Now that would make me feel like a Colonial Marine.
The motion sickness trade-off
For those of you who have motion sickness, the game has a small solution where you can flick the right thumb stick to make quick turns. Then you can move in the direction you want without too much time delay that could worsen your sickness. I did not get sick playing, and occasionally I get motion sickness.
Jefferson said the team decided not to allow you to teleport (which can help you avoid the motion that makes you sick) to nearby places. That’s because the Xenomorphs can jump out and surprise you, and that’s hard to make happen if you’re teleporting all over the place quickly. Jefferson said the amount of movement you have to engage in while fighting is limited, so you don’t get as nauseous while fighting.
This is a hard tradeoff, but it’s clear now that a segment of the population loves VR, but there are other difficulties like motion sickness that scare off players more than the horror itself.
As such, it makes sense for Survios to target the hardcore VR player — the kind that wouldn’t mind mastering difficult skills.
You have various tools like a motion detector. It’s a lifesaver when you’re slowly moving around and being stalked by aliens. You can use it to figure out the direction an alien is moving from, but you better not get preoccupied with it as they move fast and will be on you in a moment. The Xenomorphs also react to sound, and so the sound of the motion tracker could trigger them to move toward you.
To heal yourself, you can pull out a medical stim that will restore your health after you stab yourself with the syringe. There are also sticky grenades, but I didn’t get my sticky hands on them during the demo. You have a map for spaces you have explored. And there are wire cutters you can use as well.
You also have the benefit of Davis, who is helping you to survive on the ship. You can find lots of things on the ship, and I get the feeling that the most precious thing is to find ammo. I found that one of the most interesting tools in the game had nothing to do with combat. But I’ll leave that for you to wonder about as I don’t have permission to mention it yet.
Overall, the mood is what is I really liked about Alien: Rogue Incursion from what I’ve seen. You can stop by victims and find notes that humanize them for you. It’s little things like that, and the miasma of a ship that has been wrecked, that really adds to the fear.
Coming December 19
Disney provided reference assets for things like the recent Alien: Romulus film, but Survios is not working with the team working on the recently announced Alien Isolation 2 game. The game will take about eight to 10 hours to play, and it will have multiple difficulty modes.
Overall, the mood is what is really good about Alien: Rogue Incursion from what I’ve seen. You can stop by victims and find notes that humanize them for you. I really enjoyed the experience of playing the preview and hope to see more.
Disney provided reference assets for things like the recent Alien: Romulus film, but Survios is not working with the team working on the recently announced Alien Isolation 2 game. The game will take about eight to 10 hours to play, and it will have multiple difficulty modes. You can play the game sitting in a chair, standing up, or standing up with room-scale, which gives you more freedom to move around.
Alien: Rogue Incursion editions include the standard edition ($40) and the deluxe edition ($50).
Survios is a leading multi-platform game development studio that produces and publishes engaging experiences across popular licensed worlds and its own critically acclaimed original properties. The Los Angeles company has made VR games based on the The Walking Dead, Westworld, Creed and Rocky franchises.
