What’s the best Alien game after Alien: Isolation? No, it isn’t Aliens: Dark Descent, though that is an excellent real-time tactics take on James Cameron’s sequel. Neither is it Alien: Rogue Incursion, Survios’ recent VR spin on Isolation. The answer is, of course, Duskers, the 2016 indie game about scavenging derelict spacecraft using drones controlled remotely via a command-line interface.
Duskers may not be officially tied to Alien, but it captures the sci-fi peril of Ridley Scott’s movie like few others, particularly the scene where the Nostromo crew watch the motion tracker, helpless, as the xenomorph chase down Dallas in the vents. Replace Tom Skerritt with a remote-controlled Roomba, and the motion tracker with a top-down blueprint of a spaceship, and you’ve got Duskers, baby.
Duskers’ developer, Misfits Attic, hasn’t released a game since, but studio founder Tim Keenan recently released a video (via RPS) revealing what he’s been working on all this time. “For a while now, we’ve been heads-down exploring three new titles, and we finally have some playables” Keenan says at the outset. One of these games is codenamed “Humanity 2.0” and it is a spiritual successor to Duskers.
“What can I say? I still love Duskers,” Keenan says at the beginning of the Humanity 2.0 segment, before going on to explain how it expands on the ideas of that game. The Humanity 2.0 prototype uses the same wireframe visual style of Duskers, and has the same basic mechanical loop of dispatching squads of drones into decrepit spaceships to loot them of their goods, ideally without disturbing the things that might live inside.
But according to Keenan, Humanity 2.0 also adds the ability to carve up those ships and build new spacecraft out of them, then crew these new ships with your own drones, who will be able to defend them from “pirates attempting to board”. And unlike Duskers, your drones won’t be pure automatons beholden to your command. Upgrading them comes with the risk of glitches that add “fun personality quirks, like not wanting to go down narrow corridors because it’s now claustrophobic.”
It sounds like a much bigger, more varied take on the idea, although only the ship-carving is demonstrated in the video itself. I should note the other two projects sound intriguing too. One is Scheme, a fantasy political strategy game that Keenan describes as a “Littlefinger” simulator, with you playing a lowborn nobody bribing and backstabbing your way up the social ladder. Keenan says the goal is to “lower the camera” on the 4X genre, reducing the scope to something more specific and manageable. “In Scheme, you don’t even have to move troops, you simply convince powerful highborns to start wars with each other and then sell them both arms.”
The other project is called “Magic Wizard Chess”, and frankly sounds a lot vaguer than the other two concepts. In the video Keenan variously describes it as “a tactical roguelike without health bars” and “Balatro but with Chess”. There also seems to be a sprinkling of Daniel Mullins DNA, as players will be “psychologically evaluated for an unknown reason”.
To be honest, I’m sceptical about Magic Wizard Chess. But Scheme sounds like a coherent concept, and I’m fully behind a follow-up to Duskers, a game I will take any opportunity to shout about. If reading this has got you curious about the original, don’t just take my word for its quality. Chris Livingston reviewed it back in 2016 and came away utterly thrilled (and possibly mildly traumatised) “Frantically typing commands into the console when things suddenly go sideways makes me feel like I’m really huddled in a darkened dropship, alone, desperately trying to save my drones and by extension myself.”