TQ Jefferson helped me through part of an early chapter in Alien: Rogue Incursion on PC VR.
I trusted Survios’ creative director to be in charge of Rogue Incursion, but at the start of my demo he had me turn around to point out a few xenomorphs. One stood upright in the open and the other hid behind a box, both in plain sight. But in the dim industrial interior, with metal pipes snaking everywhere, it was still difficult to see them.
So yeah, I trusted Jefferson here, but not enough to keep me from pulling out my motion tracker every few seconds. I found my way to a computer terminal, but couldn’t read the screen because it was covered in blood, so I wiped it with my hands and continued the mission.
Where Alien: Isolation had you hiding in lockers to avoid a xenomorph you couldn’t actually defeat, Rogue Incursion aims to channel some of the bombastic energy James Cameron used for Aliens. Here you are expected to feel armed and ready to take on an army of these things crawling out of every crevice, although you must also be quiet so as not to draw them out unnecessarily.
“A big inspiration was the third act of that movie,” Jefferson said. “Where Ripley attaches, locks and loads, goes into the basket and starts kicking. We wanted to bring that experience to games, and VR in particular.”
If you reach towards your head, you can activate a flashlight there. If you get injured, you can stab your arm with a health kit. I refilled the rounds in my revolver, then turned it to the right and it clicked satisfactorily into place. And of course, as often as I could, I kept the pulse rifle locked and loaded.
A notable highlight of the demo was dropping the tracker on a nearby crate to free up my hands and take full advantage of the added accuracy of operating the Pulse Rifle with two hands. Survios has one of the longest histories of any VR studio when it comes to understanding the value of embodiment and presence in VR, and that’s on full display here with your arsenal strapped to every spot on your torso.
I experienced the biggest jump of the demo while crawling through an air duct when a wiring panel next to me sparked. That’s not to say the xenomorphs aren’t intimidating, but I felt a little more vulnerable without the free range to run around an open level. I was also helped during some encounters by my synthetic companion Davis 01.
“What I like about VR is that it provides a sense of intimacy,” says Rogue Incursion writer Alex White. “And so it gives you the chance to get up close to the xenomorph, yes, but it also gives you the chance to have a deep interpersonal connection with other characters, like for example Davis 01, or even the ghosts of this place where you” We see through it. There’s a lot to explore here in terms of strong characterization… and VR for me is a way to create that perfect harmony between the player’s emotions and intentions and Zula Hendricks’ emotions and intention… we want you. to enlarge. We want you to see this as both wish fulfillment and nightmare fulfillment.”
Early game level design involved the tried and true mechanics of accessing terminals, reading logs on the screens, and finding key cards to access new areas. During one battle, I staggered away from a xenomorph covered in blood, panicking so much that I forgot how to reload.
“Who is prey, who is a cat and who is a mouse changes,” Jefferson said. “One minute you’re shooting at someone, the next minute there’s someone behind you. Suddenly you’re the target. So that kind of ever-changing dynamic is part of what we think makes it exciting to play.”
At one point I was digging through boxes, Half-Life: Alyx style, looking for supplies. At another point I admired the retro-futuristic artistry and lighting efforts here, as well as the physicality of the surroundings. For example, I saw a data card that looked a lot like a military-grade floppy disk, and at one point I picked up a piece of crumpled paper from a desk and simply threw it in a trash can.
“This is the first time a lot of these things will ever happen to you in VR,” Jefferson teased. “Imagine what that could be in the world of Alien.”
I played the game on a Quest headset in wired PC VR mode, but I really want to see this game on PlayStation VR2, where the OLED display with HDR would make Alien: Rogue Incursion shine. It seems like the title will be a challenge in the graphics and physics departments, especially for Quest headsets, and when I asked if it would be delayed on its own, a Survios representative declined to comment.
Survios lists December 19 as the release date of Alien: Rogue Incursion on PS VR2, PC VR and Quest.
