"A better Alien game than any official Alien game" is how our Brendy described 2016's Duskers, the latest game that's going free for keepsies on the Epic Games Store. Duskers is a roguelikelike sci-fi horror survival game about salvaging supplies from derelict spaceships using drones, seeing through their sensor readouts and issuing commands by typing into a console. Oh, by the way, there's a reason why all these spaceships are now empty. Well, mostly empty.
So, you're alone in space. Well, mostly alone. It's (mostly) just you and your small stock of drones, jumping from ship to ship and sending your robopals out to scavenge fuel, scrap, and parts for your drones and ship. All of this is done through a command-line interface, seeing the world through map views and low-tech sensor readings and issuing commands by typing them out. That's a fun little conceit, nice gentle bit of retro computing. Then your little friends encounter something moving in that should-be empty ship, and now you need to scramble to evade and outwit whatever it is to bring home your supplies and drones.
It is very good, and quite horrible, to only see the horrors through a computer interface.
"It's one thing to make a game look like this, hooking into everyone's current lust for 'retro-futurism' or whatever it is we're calling nostalgia now, but it's another thing for the feel, atmosphere and mechanics of your game to perfectly match that style," Brendy said in our Duskers review. "This is something Duskers does unnaturally well. It is a claustrophobic, tense recreation of all the sci-fi horror you love. It's a game of desperately trying to come up with solutions with almost no resources. Imagine someone has handed you a toolbox and told you to
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