A recap: Ultimate Play the Game predicted Knight Lore’s success, and in the time given to them by delaying its release they worked on another game in the same style. Not only did they reuse the same viewpoint and gameplay, but the exact same sound effects. They could have put that towards an immediate sequel, but they did something smarter and made another game which might play the same but distinguishes itself through the most different story and setting they could think of. And so, Alien 8, where you play a robot on a long haul space journey, saving people in cryogenic storage. There’s something familiar and amusing in a view of the world that presumes the available narrative choices as being magic, nights, and lore, or technology, light years and spaceships: the two genres.
The choice does genuinely give Alien 8 a different feel, and doing them this way round with the game based on technology second is appropriate for the way in which it also presents more complexity. But the complexity is all on the game design side and not what the player can do with it. You’re still tasked with getting objects into place, even if it’s to fit a switch rather than cauldron. And now, unlike Knight Lore, there is no random starting point, and exploration is lower down the list of priorities as figuring out the puzzles of its rooms takes precedence.
In my Knight Lore post I nearly wrote about Head Over Heels, a wonderful game which uses the same genre to tell a story about two characters, their reunion and how the two of them work together across several dreamlike worlds. I played Head Over Heels as a child and thought of it as a unique idea, but I now realise it was very much building on the style started by Knight Lore. At some level I couldn’t help but unfairly hold against Knight Lore the fact that it is not Head Over Heels. That goes all the more for Alien 8, which in relying less on the basic wonder of existing in a 3D world and applying more things to interact with, more ingenuity, has a much stronger resemblance to Head Over Heels. As does the fact that, this being British sci-fi, they both have you encounter characters with Dalek designs for their bodies.
The main things which impressed me in the raw about Knight Lore – the sense of possibility and the way it made seeing the next room such a draw – are toned down in Alien 8, but all the extra meaning generated by the very specific story and setting of Head Over Heels isn’t there to compensate. The spaceship is a well realised place, but it’s a well realised place which presents technology as shutting down options instead of opening them. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
