Like plenty of Alien fans, I’ve spent my fair share of time wondering how well I’d do if I ended up in an Alien situation, stuck on a busted ship in a corner of space in a game of survival against terrifyingly resilient creatures. Turns out: Maybe not that bad, if Alien: Rogue Incursion is any analogue. I had steeled myself for my playtime with Servios’ upcoming Alien VR game to be overwhelmingly terrifying with Xenomorphs lunging at me to the point where I would struggle with my coordination. And it certainly had moments of classic Alien horror: Watching from below the grates as a Xenomorph drags a body over the rafters hits a little differently when it’s seemingly happening directly above your head. But Rogue Incursion was never endlessly frenetic. If anything, it deliberately moves slowly in parts to spatially acclimate and give people like me, who can’t help but touch things that are laying around, a chance to explore and discover the story of this Alien property for myself. That’s what Alien: Rogue Incursion’s creative director TQ Jefferson was going for when he pitched it, as he explained after my demo. The team wanted to find the “white space” of the franchise, the areas that “haven’t really been touched yet,” where they could go in and craft something original. The result is a cinematic experience that isn’t obsessed with leveling up or unlocking map areas, but a story where the player themselves, through the main character, feels the urgency to find a path forward to survive. In Rogue Incursion, which was made concurrent to Alien: Romulus but on a different, compartmentalized track, the very badass Colonel Marine with a back problem, Zula Hendricks, needs to find her friend in a new corner of space. But of course, it’s not that simple on a ship infested with nests of Xenomorphs. Rogue Incursion’s writer, Alex White, was careful to build out the lore that’s shared, obviously, via dialogue between Zula and the Synthetic Davis and ephemera, like HR emails that I especially appreciated in the spirit of the first Alien movie. After all, it is half workplace drama.Alien: Rogue Incursion – October 2024 ScreenshotsI spent about 30 minutes completing the second of eight missions in Rogue Incursion, the point of which was to validate an ID card without getting whomped by Xenomorphs. As someone who’s not putting on a VR headset all that often, it definitely took a second to get my bearings and get used to both the weapons and utilities at my disposal and the directional controls of the game, done through joysticks and not head turning. But it didn’t take me all that long to get the hang of it. According to Jefferson and White, Rogue Incursion specifically introduces all of those features at a pace that’s palatable to VR newcomers, whom they hope to lure with the sweet, sweet Alien property. On my mission, I acquired a high-grade plasma soldering iron to unseal welded doors, which I found to be particularly satisfying. And the old reliables, like my handy motion sensor, med kit, and especially crucial pulse rifle, were all in their most logical places so that I wasn’t accidentally pulling out my map tablet when I needed to shoot at a Xenomorph that suddenly started running at me. In fact, when something like that happened, I was encouraged to drop everything else to pull out my gun, and pick it up back once I was safe – a very real, very human response to danger.The Xenomorphs’ primary behavioral inspiration actually came from the “clever girl” velociraptors in Jurassic Park.I shouldn’t go on any longer without talking about the stars of the show, the Xenomorphs. White said their primary behavioral inspiration actually came from the “clever girl” velociraptors in Jurassic Park. So instead of the kind of solo cat-and-mouse game with the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, the acid-blooded bastards here are smart enough to stealthily hunt in packs and flank their prey. While it’s definitely distressing to find yourself in the center of a Xenomorph circle, it’s not untenably difficult to survive it either. While the manner in which they came at me was scary, it wasn’t dizzying; I didn’t need to try to swivel in a frenzy in every direction to figure out what was going on. And luckily, Davis had my back when a Xenomorph came at me from behind so that I could focus on the enemy in front of me.Truthfully, when I wasn’t wandering the perfectly dismal halls of the spaceship to get from one place to another, most of my game time was spent trying to avoid getting myself in a tussle. (Make enough noise, though, and you’re basically begging a swarm of them to come eat you alive.) Rogue Incursion seems to welcome all kinds of play styles, from the more cautious like me, where I’d peek around corners to check on any lurking dangers or quietly crouch in a cubicle to wait out a Xenomorph to pass, to more aggressive guns-blazing hunting tactics. My main nit is that Rogue Incursion is hamstrung by how well one can tolerate existing in a tense VR setting for extended periods of time. (For me, I felt insane after taking my headset off, like I hadn’t blinked once in 30 minutes.) Jefferson said that the main story takes about eight hours to complete, but they were careful to add plenty of space to rest (and save the game). Those breaks add a dimension of exploration into the environment beyond using huge smeared blood stains as context clues for where I’m supposed to go next. Rifling through boxes to find useful items or even putting on a stray company baseball hat makes this Alien world all the more personal and real – and isn’t that what VR is all about?
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