TQ Jefferson helped me through a slice of an early chapter in Alien: Rogue Incursion on PC VR.
I trusted the creative director at Survios leading the charge for Rogue Incursion, but at the start of my demo he had me turn around to point out a pair of xenomorphs. One was standing upright in the open and the other hid behind a box, both in plain sight. In the dim industrial interior with metal pipes weaving everywhere, though, it was still hard to see them.
So, yeah, I trusted Jefferson here, but not enough to keep 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 off with my hands and got on with the mission.
Where Alien: Isolation had you hiding in lockers to avoid a xenomorph you weren't really equipped to defeat, Rogue Incursion aims to channel some of the bombastic energy James Cameron deployed for Aliens. Here, you're supposed to feel armed and ready to take on an army of these things crawling out of every crevice, even if you also need to be quiet so as not to draw them out unnecessarily.
"A big inspiration was the third act of that film," Jefferson said. "Where Ripley straps up, locks and loads, goes down into the hive and starts kicking ass. We wanted to bring that experience to games, and VR in particular."
If you reach up to your head, you can activate a flashlight there. If you get injured, you can stab your arm with a health kit. I refilled the bullets in my revolver and then flipped it to the right and it satisfyingly snapped into place. And of course, as often as I could manage, I kept the pulse rifle out locked and loaded.
One standout highlight from the demo was dropping the tracker onto a nearby crate to free up my hands and fully benefit from the added accuracy of two-handing the Pulse Rifle. Survios has one of the longest histories of any VR studio in 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 sparked next to me. That's not to say the xenomorphs aren't intimidating, but I felt a bit more vulnerable without the free range to run around an open level. Also, during some of the encounters, I was helped by my synthetic companion Davis 01.
"The thing I like about VR is it provides a sense of intimacy," said Rogue Incursion writer Alex White. "And so it gives you a chance to get close with the xenomorph, yes, but it also gives you a chance to have a deep interpersonal connection with other characters, like for instance Davis 01, or even the ghosts of this place that you're looking through. There's a lot to discover here in terms of strong characterization...and VR for me is a way to create that perfect harmony between the player emotions and intentions and Zula Hendricks' emotions and intention....we want you to be heightened. 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 keycards to access new areas. During one combat encounter, I limped away from a xenomorph covered in blood as I panicked so much I forgot how to reload.
"Who's prey, who's cat, who's mouse changes," Jefferson said. "Like one minute you're shooting at one, the next minute there's one behind you. All of a sudden you're the target. So that sort of constantly changing dynamic is part of what we think makes it exciting to play."
At one point I was digging around in boxes, Half-Life: Alyx style, looking for supplies. At another, I found myself admiring the retro-futuristic artistry and lighting efforts here, as well as the physicality of the environment. I noticed a data card that looked much like a military-grade floppy disk, for example, and at one point I grabbed a piece of crumpled up paper from a desk and just tossed it into a trash can.
"This is the first time a lot of these things are going to ever happen to you in VR," Jefferson teased. " Imagine what that can 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. The title looks like it'll be a challenging one in the graphics and physics departments, particularly for Quest headsets, and when I asked if it would be delayed on standalone, a Survios representative declined to comment.
Survios lists December 19 as the Alien: Rogue Incursion release date on PS VR2, PC VR, and Quest.
