Xenomorph: Introduction

Xenomorph, presumably named after the Alien from Alien, is another one of those Dungeon Master-style games that aren't technically RPGs, but get labeled as them simply because they're Dungeon Master-style. I wonder how Terminator 2029 avoided the label?

Side note, I'm on a different computer than usual and had to replay some of this to get screenshots, there are much less than I'd like, sorry about that.

The story is, my ship is crippled and I need to land at Atargis Mining Station. There's nobody here, so I have to figure out what happened while finding parts for my ship. No intro sequence, but a kickass tune, lots of voice samples. I'm playing the DOS version, the DOS version doesn't seem to have any downgrades outside of PC Speaker, and unlike the Amiga version I wasn't fighting constant disk swaps. (This is how I heard a tune with voice samples, but quickly changed) According to Wikipedia, the Atari ST is broken. There's also a C64 version. At this point in time, that sort of thing's a weird novelty.

The belt there actually serves as another five item slots, just for specific objects, gun and ammo.

After the modest intro screen, I'm greeted with this. How...charming. This feels like one of those creepypastas where things are described as being ultra-realistic, those hands have had too much effort put into them. The cursor's a hand too, which is as terrible as it sounds. I find it amusing, though not entirely a coincidence, that I've been working on a sci-fi RPG whose main character is named Griffith. That's about as far as the coincidence goes, but I think I'll play this as if I'm playing as her spiritual descendant.

That was just the pack, Griffin is actually wearing clothes, in order to see something, I need to right click and hope for the best. This must be an outdoor view. There's nothing in my inventory outside of a keycard. You'd think Griffin would have a gun. The arrow keys function as duplicates for moving the mouse a certain distance. AKA, you have to do everything with the mouse. Crikey.

Griffin starts in the cockpit and can turn around to see a ladder down and a computer screen and slots for computer boards, all filled up right now. I suspect something bad is going to happen later, but the computer screen tells me everything I already knew, I can't get off this rock.

Either my ship is incredibly small or incredibly big, because down takes me to a massive area with tops of ladders up. I find a lot of stuff I have no understanding of yet. There's a red suit and a red keycard. The inventory is utterly crap by the way, you can easily hide items. I find vending machines, which if Griffin owns this ship is just so incredibly dystopic that I'm impressed.

Actually, the blue keycard seems to be a credit card or something. I get coffee, and now I have to figure out how to drink it. Aiming in this game is just absolute ass, I shudder to think how bad combat is going to be. That said, I can safely say this isn't a RPG. Unless drinking a cup of coffee somehow increased my XP. I'm not sure what I increased, even if I know logically I sated my thirst. Health, breath, ???, ???, ???. Maybe blue is food.

I find more stuff downstairs. I get a helmet, which means I should be able to leave for the surface. Some sardines, and some...things which are electronic in some way. I'm guessing one of these is a scanner and one is a jammer. They need batteries, which I find shortly, along with a gun. Unfortunately I only have two batteries. There are a lot of items here, including what seems like a suspiciously high amount of clothing in a game like this. What's happening here? Do I need it or is it just odd flavor?

I guess that was Griffin's ship. Gotta say one thing, this game actually amps up the graphics several tiers above your usual DM-clone. Usually they're quite rigid in making things look like tiles, this actually feels like a place other than a dungeon. It's not a great color palette though, perhaps its just my monitor.

First enemy. Doesn't seem to hit hard, but it takes about about a sixth, I think, of my battery. It seems like some sort of stun robot rather than a real threat. I'm just using my imagination with everything, I have nothing else to go on. The area he's guarding, or rather the two of them, but they're stupid, just has a gun with a magazine. An actual gun by the looks of it. It looks like it was designed by someone intentionally trying to make the worst gun ever.

After shooting my way through way too many stun robots, I find myself further down. Don't tell me I've been shooting my own robots. That would be fitting for this game. A door says Essen, no idea. I see this, not that I can see it while standing on it. It's what you think it is, but instead of a facehugger, its some kind of weird leech. Nasty-looking. I'll give them something, they sure know how to design something I don't want to be near.

You know, I think the second bar is a breath meter. I wonder what the ideas behind these all were. I'm guessing now that food and drink is supposed to play some role in things, but so far it hasn't mattered. At all. Health regenerates if I stand still, and breath doesn't seem to stop me in the slightest.

I find another set of computer boards in their slots, so I grab them. I figure there's something wrong with them, because you wouldn't make it this easy. Along the way I realize that these strange things might just be a place for these floppy disks I seem to be finding. I assume, I don't know what the deal with these things are, but they don't work at all. I also find what alleges to be a recharge station, also no dice.

Finding my way back to the ship, I realize I have no way of knowing which board goes where. Uh-oh. I start dropping them in, hoping I can figure it out...and then I think to put one of them in my hand as most have been replaced. Oddly, it's better and worse than I think, I just have to take out the chips and put in the right ones. I'm going to start over, since I wasted a lot of ammo for seemingly no reward in some sections, but at least I have an objective.

Before I end I finally decide to check the manual. It's for the Amiga version, so the controls are useless here, but it does explain a lot. The bars, for instance, are health, stamina, food, drink and radiation. Health is only supposed to be healed by drugs, which it obviously didn't, stamina somehow manages to heal more slowly than health but didn't seem to matter too much. Food and drink don't matter at all.
Two of the objects I was curious about were a motion detector, not really useful, and a communicator, of which I doubt there will be any living people around. I missed an atmospheric analyser, of which I doubt is that important. Or maybe I missed the motion detector.

It also explains the machines, curiously, I should have gotten something out of that obvious floppy computer, it seems to be badly put in. Shocking, I know. The good news is that as far as the "C.N.S." or Central Nervous System, the maintenance thing with all the computer boards? Placement of chips is apparently locale agnostic, I can place it anywhere I so desire. Even replacement chips.

There's nothing else of note in the manual, though they do mention that a biologist and ethnologist were recently added to staff. Clearly this wasn't an accidental find. There's a novella, but it just reveals that the cause of it all is mysterious. And that the name of who I'm playing as and who is in the novella is different. I don't think that's important though. Let's start over and try again.

My objectives, are more closely, find chips for the computer, find anti-matter fuel, and find navigational data. Hopefully the chips solve both the problem of the computer's central nervous system and a missing OS.

The floppy reader back on the ship, which I simply neglected to mention the first time, actually works, though the information I get is not. It's the expected warning, and talking about a radiation leak.

This time around, I'm avoiding combat, at least with the drones. Unless you get next to them, they don't go after you, just forever patrolling one path. I can exploit this behavior in some cheap ways, if the drones are blocking access to a room that contains nothing, I can just reload. I figure this game has limited resources. So much for playing like a spiritual descendant.

If I weren't though, this game would be infinitely frustrating, especially since there's only one save slot. A floppy was guarded by two drones in a big room that has nothing else in it. What's on the floppy? Nothing.

Finding my way down again proves quite tedious. I don't have an issue with Dungeon Master or Wizardry-style games which require me to map, I mind action games which have no reason to not include an automap. This is better about it than Rejection, but I found myself lost here. Not helped by how despite having an in-theory well-thought out interface plays like something that was just started. For instance, I'm not sure if I hit something until it dies. There's no feedback beyond shooting and getting shot.

Finally, downstairs again. Why, hey, the facehuggers seem to move like the drones, in a set pattern, ignoring you unless you unless you get close. I wonder if this is all enemies or just the little ones? Despite technical issues this game does have something going for it. I hope that something isn't a Trojan Horse.

Finding myself somewhere new, just going past the facehugger east of the ladder down, I find another floppy and another card, neither of which tell me anything at the moment. It's a keycard, which I only figured out by hoping it would work. Nothing much inside, only a coffee machine. I need about 6 or 7 coffees to fill up Griffin's drink meter, which is probably a dangerously high amount. Okay, there's also a nearly dead battery, two suits and two facehuggers, but none of that is really useful, is it?

I never thought I'd see a game that alternates between giving the player too much at one time and then nothing at all. Another room with a coffee machine, and hey, a computer. It's just world building, and excuses for why this place looks so empty. I wonder if it's going to be an actual plot point or if this is just an excuse? Are we going to find chair xenomorphs?

Then I find some mines. It's another thing you have to figure out by design and context, they're just on the ground, so maybe someone tried to set them up? I'll try it. I see two facehuggers and I use it. Whoops, it's a grenade. Boy is it ever effective. So effective that by the time I want to risk using it, its probably going to be useless. Unless there's too big a concentration of these things. What I will do right now is sneak these guys off into some room I can close. Facehuggers haven't evolved hands yet. I wonder if this behavior was intended?

Another note, this time telling me that there's a motion detector for some blob creature. Either it's the facehuggers or the game is probably overhyping something. I find it later. Things are looking up, I've even found the stairs down, though I still have a lot to do here, since I haven't found the boards again.

But I do find an antimatter generator, which I can take antimatter out of. No guesses if you can figure out that this is what increases my radiation level, fortunately at such a slow pace that I could realistically take several such journeys if need be, but the medical machines do have anti-rad drugs. Oddly, I need to use my ID card there rather than my credit card. The game doesn't tell you what drug does what, so I tried them all until something removed my radiation, number 6 then reloaded. I'm going to hold off on using it until I have a good chunk of radiation meter.

This turns out to have all been for nothing, because my ship seems to have no more fuel than before. Whether this is because I did something wrong, it was a tiny amount or what I got was already depleted, I can't say. There is a device I'm supposed to use to carry the fuel, but I haven't found one. It'll probably be somewhere really annoying.

It's a good thing too, because I can't find my way back to where I was. Better news is that I quickly find another gun, green for some reason, which uses a different kind of battery. Now I have three guns. I also find something I can't use but I think is a rocket. No matter for now, it'll take a while before that's useful.

Quickly, I find what I want again, even better, I figure out how to recharge my batteries. Now I shall have no trouble at all with enemies, I don't even need to spare them now. So much for playing this like a survival horror game. I guess now I can play like I wanted to originally. What else is here? Oh, another floppy.

Project Xenomorph, and despite what it sounds like, they're dealing with this as best as they can. They put the facehuggers in an area where they wouldn't get hurt, so the could track them, and they found out they're connected to the floaters in the caverns. What floater? I know about blobs. Interestingly, this is some hard sci-fi, they note that it'll take two years for a reply, no doubt from someone with the authority to send a ship out here. Another floppy I picked up earlier details a crystal entity of some sort.

I decide I'm going to hold off on taking the computer chips, I don't know if that's going to affect anything. And that's everything on the first two levels, well, I do find another rocket on the first floor, but that's not major. This is a good place for me to stop, since I seem to have removed all challenge from this game now, leaving only tedium. It's fun in some places, boring in others. When we get back I'll have eliminated most of the drones on the first floor.

This Session: 4 hours 00 minutes