Review: ALIEN Offworld Colony Simulator

Voice games produced by major film studios are particularly exciting for me to review, because they typically have a wealth of development and content resources, and are only limited by how good the actual game design is. For the occasion of Alien Day (April 26th), 21st Century Fox recently released an Alexa Skill which allows players to escape from an alien-infested offworld colony. Let’s explore!

Exciting! Before you analyze the game — What was that thing about Alien Day?

This year (2018), there was a rather big campaign about Alien Day, April 26th, which is, according to the campaign website:

[… the] third annual global celebration of the iconic sci-fi franchise. […] The 24-hour fan-centric holiday will also feature an ALIEN franchise film binge opportunity, exclusive giveaways, tournaments, brand-new product launches, special reveals and more.

The ‘ALIEN: Offworld Colony Simulator’ (let’s just call it by its invokation name ‘Alien Simulator’ for the rest of this article) is the most highly promoted one of the three features the campaign website offers (along with an Alien-themed personality test and a ‘Survival Assessment’, which is basically a browser version of the same game).

I can’t estimate how big the overall #ALIENDAY campaign was, but on Twitter alone, the @AlienAnthology account has about 59k followers, so… The discoverability part of this voice game was definitely taken part of!

Alright, got it. Now, what is the actual game about?

The game itself is described and referenced as (the beta version of) an ‘Offworld Colony Simulator’, provided by the in-universe Weyland-Yutani company, in which test subjects can train to handle the security hazards of stress situations (which is a mild understatement) — But this is only the narrative frame, and is not refered to very much in the actual gameplay.

In the actual game, you assume the role of an anonymous staff member of a space colony (sponsored, again, by Weyland-Yutani). The colony’s facilities are being locked down because of alien contamination (yes, that’s where the ‘xenomorph’ alien comes in), and you need to get out of the facilities before their self-destruct/decontamination routines kick in.
The ‘facilities’ are organised in sections, and you have a fixed amount of ‘security cycles’ (i.e. rounds) to escape. Escaping is easy:

• You just need to find two override keys somewhere in the section
• To get the override keys, you need to explore the section, and typically special rooms like the lab, the armory or the command center
• To enter the rooms, you need to open doors, either by finding access cards or by solving riddles (anagrams and trivia questions)
• Meanwhile, you get assaulted by an Alien, and either have to fight it off or outrun it
• To heal yourself, fight off the Alien or get other advantages for you survival, you’re well advised to collect inventory whereever you find it

And all the while, the clock is ticking!

The game is described as a ‘turn-based exploration and survival game’, but this aspect of finding a solution under time pressure strongly reminds me of an ‘exit room’ kind of game, or of the tabletop game ‘Legends of Andor’.

An interesting aspect of the game is that it is advertised as having a multiplayer mode. However, multiplayer mode simply means that up to three players can play with a single device, and delegate tasks among them — Like one person talking to Alexa, another drawing the map, and the third keeping track of stats and inventory.

Alright, so it’s a time-restricted dungeon crawler set in the ALIEN universe.
Sounds really complex! How does the game accout for all this complexity?

Great point, the game is really ‘heavyweight’ in terms of information, and thus mental load. Let’s take a look at the factors that affect gameplay, and thus potentially need to be kept in mind:

• Health
  This is a very salient and obvious stat, and it’s actually easy to remember. You start with 4 health points, and loose one point if you’re attacked by the Alien. Your health can be restored with medipacks, and overall health capacity can be increased as you progress through the sections.
• Remaining rounds (‘security cycles’)
  You don’t need to remember this one — The game reminds you regularly of how few cycles remain, thus creating a pervasive feeling of urgency.
  During the game, you receive items that can prolong your ‘deadline’.
• Sector map
  The sector’s map is a key element of the game. It always covers a 5x5 rectangular grid, and you always start in field A3, but… It’s pretty much impossible to accurately remember the map, and solving a sector is very difficult without having one.
• Inventory
  Your inventory holds the keys for victory — In a very literal sense of the two override keys you need to find and bring to the exit in each sector. Beside that, your inventory holds other items that increase your chances of survival, like weapons and medicine. You’ve initially got 15 inventory slots, so after a while you need to be picky about what you carry around.

By now it should be obvious that this is not a casual game that you can play while washing the dishes. Let’s take a look at the assets that potentially alleviate your mental load:

• Character Sheet
  The producers provide a character sheet, bearing some resemblance to that of a pen-and-paper role playing game, in which you can note your stats, inventory and the sector’s map. The game’s FAQs suggest to use a pencil, so you can re-use the sheets for multiple sectors.
• Smart Screen
  If you own a Echo Show or Echo Spot, you can use it to enjoy the visuals of the game. The screen displays terminal-like representations of the room or corridor you’re currently in, or an image of your datapad. However, the game is not truly multimodal, in the sense that you can interact with it through different modes — In this case, you can’t use the screen to view your stats, browse the inventory or navigate the map.
• Sheet of paper
  This is my personal solution, since I only need a place to draw the map.
• Voice Interface
  For health, remaining rounds and inventory, you can ask Alexa within the game for the current status. These are accessible via a ‘datapad’ (i.e. character menu). Unfortunately, the game doesn’t allow commands like ‘What’s in my inventory?’, ‘How many flamethrowers do I have?’ or ‘Use a medipack!’ — Instead, you need to go through several interactions for each of those intents.

Alright, now we’ve talked a lot about how complex this game is.
The interesting question is… How engaging is it?

Yes, this is the key question! Let’s dig into the game’s engagement features.

• Narration
  ‘Alien Simulator’ uses the ‘classic’ abstract second person point of view, which makes sense, since you are seemingly alone in the game facilities.
  An interesting choice about the narration is that it uses exclusively Alexa’s voice, in a rather distanced and transactional style. While this choice might be motivated by the story’s frame (You’re talking to a computer simulation after all), I personally find this lack of expressiveness disturbing: Boring texts like ‘You’re at a junction. The corridor splits off at three directions’ use exactly the same intonation as high-stress texts like ‘A terrifying creature lunges at you from the shadows, piercing your with its knife-like tail!’. In my personal opinion, this is one of the major weaknesses of the game, in the sense of it not fulfilling it’s potential.
  How else could the game have been narrated?
  My guess is that the best option in terms of engagement would have been a first-person perspective of the person traversing the facilities, talking to you on the intercom. The person could say things like ‘Hm.. I’m at a junction. The corridor splits off in three directions. Should I go north, south or east?’, and you could have a dialog with them. This would be a really conversational interface, right?
• Audio content
  Great audio content consistently comes up as an engagement factor for voice games, and the ability to provide original, high-quality sound effects is a factor that differentiates hobby-scale games from professional ones. Unfortunately, again, ‘Alien Simulator’ falls short of my expectations: It is simply not very effective in using audio effects. Quality-wise, they are alright, but probably not the best the audio engineers of 21st Century Fox could have produced. The actual reason why they hardly contribute to the overall ‘feeling’ of the game is that they are too short (typically about one second) and too sparse (mainly in combat situations, but not in the game’s opening or routine situations) to make much of a difference. Both ‘The Magic Door’ and ‘Mein Auftrag’ are examples for Skills that use audio effects (in combination with Alexa’s voice) much more effective for building atmosphere.
• Building tension
  Engagement is a lot about immersively arousing emotions, and this is something the ‘Alien Simulator’ does exceedingly well! The approaching deadline, the fear of the next Alien attack, and the prospect of losing your ‘investment’ of your map and your inventory combine well to a feeling of anxiety and rush — Pure Adrenaline!
• Curiosity
  Starting in the second level, you receive hints about this game being somewhat more than a simulator, with more hints being hidden in the next levels. On a more meta level, you encounter interesting elements in the game, such as a space helmet or a power loader, and wonder how these elements might affect the gameplay in this or the next level.
• Learning curve
  A good game combines elements of both luck and competence, and the best games adapt the difficulty level to the level of both in-game (improving character stats and better inventory) and external (player know how to effectively manage game situations) competence. This is another thing ‘Alien Simulator’ does very well!

That’s quite a mixed bag of engagement factors!
How about retention, then? What motivates players to play again?

Yes, that’s another one of my favourite questions. Let’s start drilling down!

• Engagement
  If you enjoy and appreciate a game’s experience, you want more of it. Especially the ‘Curiosity’ and ‘Learning Curve’ factors covered above contribute to both engagement and retention.
• Hook Cycle
  This game is complex enough to have what Nir Eyal describes as the ‘Hook Cycle’: You take some action (exploring the level), get a variable reward (items, character enhancements), invest in your character (gear and a boost on character stats) and receive an internal trigger (next level) to take more action. It’s not the most impressive implementation of the hook cycle (compared to social networks and games like Clash Royale), but good enough to drive some engagement and retention.

That’s basically it, for retention. It’s only two items — No global highscore, badges or daily habits — but they are not too bad.

Alright. Now, what’s your overall assessment of this game?

Hm, difficult! There’s one thing this game excels in, which is to create a thrilling, non-trivial game scenario on a 5x5 grid with a moderately simple set of rules.
Unfortunately, however, ‘Alien Simulator’ is not optimized for the voice-only, or even voice-first gaming experience: On the input side, it burdens the user with too much information (especially the map and the inventory), and provides too little support (like showing the map or the inventory on a screen or Skill card, taking input from a screen, or offering more direct ways to interact with inventory items, like saying ‘Use a medipack!’). On the output side, it makes no use of immersive storytelling techniques, but relies completely on describing situations to the user (with interspersed sound effects).

This is probably the most negative review I’ve written so far, and I wish I could have praised the game more. But the bar for ‘Alien Simulator’ is really high: It was produced by 21st Century Fox, and the game’s concept is actually really decent. Within the game, the ‘Offworld colony simulator’ is a beta version, so maybe we will still see a version of the game that achieves more of its potential.

Was I too critical with this game? Where do you agree or disagree? If it was your game and you had 21st Century Fox’ resources, what would you have done differently? I look forward to your thoughts!