Horrors of Space

Way too hard and very little from the devs. Not sure this is even still being worked on.

I really enjoy this game, but it's very challenging, and I've only played the single player experience. I discovered this game about a year ago when I came across it during a random search. Back then it was only the single player demo, which had no difficulty selector, and only three characters to choose from. The demo was insanely hard and I couldn't find anyone who had completed it. The game released into early access a few weeks ago and I've only experienced one bug, which was quickly patched (the alien spotting you through cover). Everything else has been super-smooth. You can pick from one of six classes, all of whom you can upgrade individually by spending points that you earn in game. At the time of writing you can also spend those points on character skins, which I'm doing as I don't know if they're timebound. Each character has its own strength - for example, the Commander can use a cloaking device (like Predator) to remain hidden from the alien but moving whilst cloaked will cause you to be seen; the Security Guard can use night vision, which not only shows up items in the room, but other players' and the alien's position through walls. This is my favourite class to play with, as it becomes very tactical keeping the alien at a distance as you move around the ship. The object of the game is to find keycards scattered randomly around the ship to unlock rooms to terminals. When you find a terminal you can either hack it (play a series of minigames) or find the password to use it safely. If you choose to hack and fail a minigame, you'll trigger an alarm and the alien will come running. I prefer to find the passwords. When you boot up a workstation, it'll tell you where the password is and the colour it's in, so if there's more than one password written in a room, you'll know which is the correct one. They can be devilishly hard to spot - for example, tiny writing underneath a desk - but you can zoom in with right mouse. Successfully hacking or entering a password provides some power to the escape pods, and the amount of terminals you need to power up depends on difficulty and number of players. Single player easy mode needs two. But whilst you're doing all this, the alien will stalk the ship to try to kill you. It can hear your movement, and can smell you when you're close (but I'm not quite clear how the scent mechanic works). How far away it can hear you depends on difficulty level. No matter what class you play you have a minimap and motion detector that bleeps when the alien is near (and gets higher pitched if it's really close) and also shows you where the keycards and terminals are. The alien is pretty tough to handle. If it knows you're in the area, it can search lockers where you might be hiding and if it opens one whilst you're inside, it's a one-hit kill, whereas if the alien is chasing you and hits you, you'll lose some life but won't die instantly, however, most of the time, if the alien sees you it's game over. You can craft items like noise emitters, smoke bombs, Molotov cocktails and other items to help you, but I don't tend to do this much as I prefer to avoid the alien rather than combat it. The most valuable resource is batteries, as these not only power your flashlight (hardly needed) but also your special item, like the aforementioned night vision. Batteries are drained faster in higher difficulties. I've seen this game is getting a lot of negative reviews, which is a real shame, as this is a very polished experience for a solo dev's first game, with bags of potential in the form of new maps, monsters and mechanics. I think the flashing lights are excessive and could be toned down, and I feel the alien is a tad challenging in single player mode (I've still not progressed beyond Easy really), but that's a temporary barrier that I can overcome. Crafting could be more relevant, and this game could benefit immensely from procedural generation, but these are things that can be added or considered throughout early access. In terms of the alien's design and presence, I'm not much of a fan. The alien looks like a classic grey Martian on steroids and stomps around the ship like it owns it. Once you've played Alien Isolation and witnessed the nightmare fuel that is HR Giger's xenomorph it sets the benchmark for an alien organism. This makes the game tense rather than scary, but I'd love to see more horrific monsters with guerrilla tactics in a future update. But overall, this is a really fun, challenging and interesting indie multiplayer horror that I highly recommend.