With the possible exception of 1992’s Alien 3 for the Game Boy and 2014’s Alien: Isolation, video game adaptations of the Aliens franchise have struggled to capture the tension and horror of the films. It takes both foresight and a particular skill to make the player feel vulnerable in a game while still providing an enjoyable experience, and in that regard, the more action-driven adaptations have especially come up short. Few certainly capture what Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens do—the crippling fear of being helpless against an incomprehensible enemy—and without reducing the threat to cannon-fodder.
Aliens: Dark Descent bucks this trend. Here, players take control of a squad of space marines on the moon of Lethe, where an alien outbreak has spread across a colony under the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Unlike most real-time strategy games, missions begin with a focus on stealth, where the marines carefully maneuver the derelict halls of abandoned space stations trying to avoid contact with Xenomorph threats as they complete varied objectives. Accidentally coming face to face with a Xenomorph will raise a hive’s awareness, triggering an increasing rush of Xenomorphs that will force you to switch up your gameplay as you fight for survival.
From the nature of its stress debuffs to the evocation of psychological breakdowns, Dark Descent takes more than a few cues from games like Darkest Dungeon and Warhammer 40,000. Your stress throughout the game will range from Relaxed (White) to Terrified (Red), with Traumas making your stress debuffs even more pronounced. Individual traumas have interesting and clever impacts on the gameplay: When suffering from depression, marines start each mission at a higher level of stress and are thus more vulnerable, and if gripped by claustrophobia, you’ll be unable to reduce stress when resting in safe areas.
Given the multiple character classes and the unique role that each marine will play in each of your missions, these debuffs can have startling effects on your gamplay as you take on Xenomorphs and rogue agents from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Everything has to be taken into consideration, as even minor encounters can take a heavy toll across the game’s campaign. Another welcome layer of depth is that the management of your marines is handled away from the main action on the USS Otago, with a comprehensive and detailed system allowing for customization, equipment, training, and additional features, such as a memorial for the deceased and a Psychiatric Care Unit for the treatment of traumas.
The degree to which the game encourages you to find key strategies to manage everything from stress to resources is impressive, even startling. Just as marines must rest to heal through physical injuries, stays in the clinic will reduce traumas over time, but at the cost of your not being able to use those marines in missions. And in the same way that Dark Descent’s resources must be carefully managed in order to find the best ways to complete missions, swapping marines and teams becomes necessary in order to avoid any significant losses.
This is because death in Dark Descent is permanent, and losing any marine leaves an impact on the narrative and the player. Often, when faced with insurmountable odds, evacuating from an incomplete mission can be preferable to taking further losses in a desperate struggle. That sense of desperation lends a palpable sense of dread toward the end of the game, when a time limit comes into play, as you’ll no doubt have become attached to your squad of marines and must find a way to keep them alive while working toward escape from the doomed Lethe. Because once your completely swarmed by Xenomorphs, survival is impossible.
It only helps that Dark Descent so ably captures the look and tone of the Alien films. While the characters here aren’t as immediately memorable as the motley crew of marines from Aliens, the voice actors humanize them with impressive details, thus sealing our investment in their fates. The environments are appropriately menacing, with clever fog effects that make each excursion into the “hived” areas an intense experience. And the familiar tick, tick, tick of the iconic motion tracker adds to the stress of every mission. It really wouldn’t be an Aliens game without it.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Sandbox Strategies on June 20
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