An incremental game that really nails the presentation, it both looks beautiful and sounds great, especially considering the theme that it is going for. It has much more story than most incrementals and even a few puzzles to solve along the way. The core gameplay is pretty good too, although it does have a bit of a questionable emphasis on RNG for an incremental game. In total, it is a nicely well rounded experience with a few good highs and none of the lows in comparison.
There are 3 different difficulty settings to the game, with the only difference being in how much the upgrades cost, to let people customize how fast they want to beat the game and how impactful they want each upgrade to feel. I picked the normal difficulty for my playthrough, and my playtime ended up being a little over 2 hours, and then a bit of time after that hunting down the secrets and completing the small puzzles in order to achieve the true ending. All things considered, that was a pretty good amount of length for a short incremental, considering many of them run at roughly 2 hours or less these days. While I have not replayed it yet, nor intend to anytime soon, it is also worth mentioning that this game is theoretically more replayable than most.
Onto reviewing the actual game, starting with the best and most obvious part; its graphics. This is a big step up from the average indie incremental and perhaps the game's biggest strong suit. It is probably the most tasteful execution of the CRT pixel artstyle I have seen in an incremental, both with an in universe reason why it would look like that, being based on the old Alien movies, as well as having above average pixel art to back it up. The sound design is likewise very well done too, with pops and screams appropriate for the plentiful deaths of both xenos and convicts.
The gameplay is less good in comparison with the excellent graphics, but it still gets the job done. The base minigame that everything runs on is pretty fun as far as they go and there was a great amount of care put into the details here as well. For example, the xenos are actually able to hide in the darkness, and so you have to actively hunt for them with your cursor or invest into upgrades that give more light in order to see them better. There is a decent variety of levels to play in, each with their own little gimmick to them and plenty of different xenos ready to slaughter convicts. The problems come in the RNG heavy nature of the game.
Xenosensory makes the odd choice of having a (atleast seemingly) pseudo random skilltree. I think this is based on the idea that someone might try and replay the game, and thus wouldn't have as stale of an experience doing so because the upgrades would be semi-randomized. That is nice in theory, but doesn't really work in practice. To achieve this, they have to grind up most of the skilltree upgrades into being mostly similar and uniform to eachother interms of power, and you also lose the potential to have a truly special curated experience. There are very few standout or big ticket upgrades, and the majority of them are simply duplicate stat increases, usually quite minor in nature and that will take a fairly significant time to pay for themselves. Furthermore, many of the upgrades themselves have inherently random effects, with most of them being chance based with the chance to do nothing at all. Since there are so many of these individual upgrades, it still averages out to be mostly fine, but it does lead to a lot of upgrades feeling bland, and even the interesting ones were made less interesting.
The randomness doesn't end there though, because a little ways through the game you will unlock both equipable actions and passives which you can buy using one of the 3 currencies in the game, and this currency is completely dedicated to this. However, you don't buy them in the way you would expect, no, instead you gamble for the abilities through a makeshift gacha machine. This means that your abilities you get each playthrough will be completely random, which much like with the skilltree does add to the theoretical replay value of the game, but once again deprives you of much of the strategy and agency you would have otherwise had. There is a pretty wide variety of abilities, some of them a fair bit better than others, which is par for the course with any ability system, but because of the random nature of the gacha, the crappy abilities can end up eating upgrade attempts that could have gone to the better or more interesting abilities. There is also a moderate amount of synergy between certain abilities in the game, such as for example an ability that spawns a bunch of convicts and then another ability that multiplies the value of currently alive convicts. The problem is that because your access to these abilities is basically tied to the whims of fate, you may not see these synergies until you are most of the way through the game and have enough currency to have rolled the gacha enough to unlock everything. Even if you do have the synergies, you may not get their required upgrades for a significant amount of time either. While in the end, the randomness wasn't a dealbreaker for the gameplay, I do feel like the game would probably have benefited from not leaning so heavily into RNG just for the sake of replayability that for many people, is probably atleast a year or two down the road, if will happen at all.
The last thing of note is the game's story. Most incremental games either don't have a story, or it is extremely basic and barebones, and in fairness, the story aspect is generally not what people play incremental games for. Xenosensory DOES have a story though, and it is a reasonably serviceable one at that. It comes in the form of around 40 or so little messages that get unlocked by progressing through the levels and hunting down the secrets. I found it to be an alright story, but nothing really that groundbreaking. The bar is pretty low, and as already mentioned incremental gamers like me don't tend to value the story of a game all that highly. Alongside the story is a secret ending unlocked by completing all of the small puzzles and finding all of the small secrets. Most of them are pretty reasonable to do, and this does provide another nice bit of content that helps give it a leg up over its peers.
All in all, this one was pretty good. If you like incrementals, you are pretty likely to enjoy it, and at its pricetag you almost certainly won't regret it picking it up, and god forbid the value if you find it on sale. While the incremental gameplay itself can at times feel a bit like consuming slop, sometimes slop is just what you crave, and this game more than makes up for it in other areas anyway.
