One rather typical Halloween eve, Benjamin is witnessing his uncle's attempt to activate the Worm Hole Spawner, his latest invention. The experiment works, and a hole in the sky rips open. Meanwhile in a galaxy far, far away, an entity, chased by a spaceship, accidentally dive into the worm hole which suddenly appears before them. The spaceship hits the brakes and starts to orbit around earth. The commander of the spaceship, Boss, orders a group of aliens to land on earth and bring back the one that's responsible for getting them where they are. The alien shuttle lands next to the mansion and four white little aliens emerge from inside. They enter the mansion and grab Benjamin's uncle, while Ben himself is hiding behind the Worm Hole Spawner. Unnoticed, Benjamin is left behind with a task to solve the alien mystery and rescue his uncle... and possibly the galaxy as well.
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This game was FUN. The graphics are simply beautiful. It sets an ambience that draws you into the story like few games do. A MUST play if you are into point click adventure games.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/03/14/alien-incident-1996-review/
It’s nice coming across a lesser known adventure game. People always talk about the heavyweights such as Sierra’s and Lucas Art’s library of games, or even Telltale Games, along with stuff like 7th Guest, Myst, Zork, and Broken Sword. But every now and again when I’m looking through websites hosting obscure games, I come across a hidden gem not a lot of people seem to know about. One of these games is Alien Incident.
Released in 1996 after 2 years of delays, and originally known as Muukalaisten Yö (Finnish for “Night of the Aliens”), Alien Incident was developed by a small team called Bloodhouse before they merged with Housemarque, and was published by GameTek for MS-DOS in 1996, which was getting a little late for MS-DOS games to still be released. There was going to be an Amiga 1200 version, but that got cancelled.
The game takes place on Halloween, and Benjamin Richards is at his uncle’s mansion to bear witness to his newest invention, the “Worm Hole Spawner.” But at the moment it’s turned on, it is hit by lightening, accidentally creating a wormhole in space that brings an alien spaceship who happens to be chasing another alien species through into our solar system. The aliens kidnap Benjamin’s uncle to know why they were brought here, while Benjamin, you, have to rescue as well as stopping the alien threat.
Getting this game to work isn’t too bad, since it’s a DOS game. Just the usual mild fiddling with DOSBox, nothing too difficult. However the game did crash one me once or twice, and that lead me to discovering a great little unique feature that the game has when it crashes. When you re-open the game, it loads right back to just before when it crashed, preventing a major loss in progress.
This might initially sound annoying, but the game is actually pretty stable and rarely ever crashes. It’s like the original (anti-crash) checkpoint before checkpoints became a gaming staple, and it’s a nice addition to have for an adventure game. It certainly prevents the save scumming that a lot of old point-and-click adventure games needed just to be tolerable.
Even if the game didn’t have this feature, the games world isn’t that big, so backtracking to find something or just to explore isn’t that much of a problem. Thankfully the game isn’t Sierra hard, and every puzzle makes sense or can be easily be solved with a bit of thought and exploration. Which makes this good for a younger audience.
I have two gripes with this game. They’re not major, but they still stand out. The first gripe is that there is one part of the game that can screw you over, and you don’t see it coming and it can set you back to however long ago your last save was. It doesn’t require going back and replaying most of the game, so it shouldn’t take you too long to catch up to this section if you’ve remembered the adventure game mantra “Save Early, Save Often.”
The second gripe I have is that another part of the game has a short maze. It’s not the worst maze I’ve seen in an adventure game in that once you’ve memorized the route, you can get through it faster on multiple playthroughs, but it’s still annoying when you do it for the first time and incredibly tedious on multiple playthroughs.
I’ll never why some adventure games decided to have mazes in their games. Mazes are annoying in the best of games. Thankfully, when you reach the end of the maze, you don’t have to backtrack through it, with the game kindly teleporting you back to the beginning of it. Even the developers knew how annoying that would have been, which begs the question of why they even put it here in the first place.
Pretty much everything else is minor nitpicks, such as there being one or two things that you need to interact with that blend into the background. Thankfully the game has some text when you highlight an object, so it’s not too hard to find something, you just to sometimes sweep the mouse cursor across the screen.
The pathfinding for the main character is a bit wonky, but it’s a minor gripe. There will be a time where he’s walking or you click to going in a direction, only for him to be briefly turned around before going where you want him to go. I don’t know if that’s a bug with the game or the way I’ve got the game setup, but it isn’t a major issue, just a mildly annoying glitch.
Alien Incident isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely worth checking out for fans of adventure games who haven’t yet played this game yet and are looking for something to fulfill that adventure game shaped hole in their heart, of adventure game veterans who want to go back and play it for the first time in years.
On top of that, the game’s humor is actually pretty amusing. It’s pretty obvious that English wasn’t the developers first language, but most of the jokes land despite that.
It’s nice coming across a lesser known adventure game. People always talk about the heavyweights such as Sierra’s and Lucas Art’s library of games, or even Telltale Games, along with stuff like 7th Guest, Myst, Zork, and Broken Sword. But every now and again when I’m looking through websites hosting obscure games, I come across a hidden gem not a lot of people seem to know about. One of these games is Alien Incident.
Released in 1996 after 2 years of delays, and originally known as Muukalaisten Yö (Finnish for “Night of the Aliens”), Alien Incident was developed by a small team called Bloodhouse before they merged with Housemarque, and was published by GameTek for MS-DOS in 1996, which was getting a little late for MS-DOS games to still be released. There was going to be an Amiga 1200 version, but that got cancelled.
The game takes place on Halloween, and Benjamin Richards is at his uncle’s mansion to bear witness to his newest invention, the “Worm Hole Spawner.” But at the moment it’s turned on, it is hit by lightening, accidentally creating a wormhole in space that brings an alien spaceship who happens to be chasing another alien species through into our solar system. The aliens kidnap Benjamin’s uncle to know why they were brought here, while Benjamin, you, have to rescue as well as stopping the alien threat.
Getting this game to work isn’t too bad, since it’s a DOS game. Just the usual mild fiddling with DOSBox, nothing too difficult. However the game did crash one me once or twice, and that lead me to discovering a great little unique feature that the game has when it crashes. When you re-open the game, it loads right back to just before when it crashed, preventing a major loss in progress.
This might initially sound annoying, but the game is actually pretty stable and rarely ever crashes. It’s like the original (anti-crash) checkpoint before checkpoints became a gaming staple, and it’s a nice addition to have for an adventure game. It certainly prevents the save scumming that a lot of old point-and-click adventure games needed just to be tolerable.
Even if the game didn’t have this feature, the games world isn’t that big, so backtracking to find something or just to explore isn’t that much of a problem. Thankfully the game isn’t Sierra hard, and every puzzle makes sense or can be easily be solved with a bit of thought and exploration. Which makes this good for a younger audience.
I have two gripes with this game. They’re not major, but they still stand out. The first gripe is that there is one part of the game that can screw you over, and you don’t see it coming and it can set you back to however long ago your last save was. It doesn’t require going back and replaying most of the game, so it shouldn’t take you too long to catch up to this section if you’ve remembered the adventure game mantra “Save Early, Save Often.”
The second gripe I have is that another part of the game has a short maze. It’s not the worst maze I’ve seen in an adventure game in that once you’ve memorized the route, you can get through it faster on multiple playthroughs, but it’s still annoying when you do it for the first time and incredibly tedious on multiple playthroughs.
I’ll never why some adventure games decided to have mazes in their games. Mazes are annoying in the best of games. Thankfully, when you reach the end of the maze, you don’t have to backtrack through it, with the game kindly teleporting you back to the beginning of it. Even the developers knew how annoying that would have been, which begs the question of why they even put it here in the first place.
Pretty much everything else is minor nitpicks, such as there being one or two things that you need to interact with that blend into the background. Thankfully the game has some text when you highlight an object, so it’s not too hard to find something, you just to sometimes sweep the mouse cursor across the screen.
The pathfinding for the main character is a bit wonky, but it’s a minor gripe. There will be a time where he’s walking or you click to going in a direction, only for him to be briefly turned around before going where you want him to go. I don’t know if that’s a bug with the game or the way I’ve got the game setup, but it isn’t a major issue, just a mildly annoying glitch.
Alien Incident isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely worth checking out for fans of adventure games who haven’t yet played this game yet and are looking for something to fulfill that adventure game shaped hole in their heart, of adventure game veterans who want to go back and play it for the first time in years.
On top of that, the game’s humor is actually pretty amusing. It’s pretty obvious that English wasn’t the developers first language, but most of the jokes land despite that.