What if instead of nuking the site from orbit, we lived there
The other day I posted a comment wondering whether anybody has ever made a colony simulator set in the Aliens universe, with players raising the Weyland-Yutani flag on planets that contain absolutely no parasitic lifeforms whatsoever [YOUR MISGIVINGS HAVE BEEN REPORTED TO CORPORATE. YOUR TERRAFORMING LICENSE HAS BEEN SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY. NO CRIMINAL CHARGES WILL BE FILED AT THIS TIME]. Some hours later, I realised that I'd sort of already played one. Before Darkness Falls is a "tactical survival game" in which you take charge of an industrial compound that is being nibbled away from below by a marauding evil.
"Scrag is not a clean sci-fi utopia," explains the Steam page. "It is 150 years of corroded machinery, improvised repairs, sealed sectors, toxic air, and collapsing transit networks. Entire districts continue operating long after being abandoned, while others vanished from the network decades ago. Somewhere in the dark, something continues to spread." For clarity, they are not referring to rising damp. They are referring to awful bug monsters. Express elevator to hell, going down! And down. And down. And down.
I sampled an early build for Before Darkness Falls at Digital Dragons last month, and came away hopeful, inasmuch as one should hope for a game about perishing inside metal labyrinths of teeth and fumes. The rhythm of play alternates between a base management layer and missions into abandoned sectors. Why go to abandoned sectors? Sometimes for medical supplies for your layabout civilians; sometimes to fix gaskets and the like that are poisoning the residential areas above; sometimes in search of answers about the bug monster plague.
The missions themselves feel like segments from Aliens: Dark Descent, their depths doused in fog of war. You've got a squad of highly expendable-looking jarheads, armed with a blend of guns, grenades and gadgets. You can move them individually or as a mob, and give orders to hold position, defend each other, and so on. Precise control is fairly important. I had to navigate a corridor full of flaming vents, for example, while shooting at Scragbeasts sneaking up behind me.
Why yes, I did get everybody eaten/incinerated, though that was partly down to a combination of uneven decking and imperfect AI pathfinding. In general, I didn't find the game to be as intricate or oppressive as Dark Descent at its best – I spent a lot of the demo running between crates of salvage, while mopping up groups of roaming filthbastards. But in fairness, we're talking about 15 minutes with a five month prototype, knocked together mostly for the attention of prospective publishers. I do like the whole "live inside a collapsing oil refinery with an exotic cockroach problem" conceit.
The devs are Maverick Souls, who comprise veterans of Dying Light 2 and Frostpunk 2. Their logo art is a picture of a wizard holding a shotgun, which efficiently expresses both an adherence to conventions and a desire to mildly transgress upon those conventions. The developer manning the booth at Digital Dragons said he'd never even played Aliens: Dark Descent. Sorry man.
This article was based on a press trip to Digital Dragons, with the event's organisers paying for travel and accommodation.