I just completed part 1 of Alien: Rogue Incursion and I really liked it. it feels like if Alien: Isolation was an action-horror FPS, but it also does a lot of things that I really wish Alien: Isolation had done:

• a lot more thought was put into the environments. like what is this room for? how does it fit into the overall layout of the area that you’re in? what is this division of the station for? etc.
• a lot more thought was also put into the objectives, like what kind of technology are you manipulating right now and to what end?
• there’s a lot of {manipulating physical objects in your environment} which I find very grounding. I especially love the rewiring minigame because it’s so seamless and feels like it’s just another part of the world that you’re interacting with
• overall the world just feels much more real and substantial than in Alien: Isolation. you can really take your time to appreciate little details and they will all make sense in context
• the intensity is never cranked up too high. I found the intensity of the second half of Alien: Isolation to be pretty exhausting - just being consistently high with no breaks
• the map is much smaller and more focused and there’s a lot of backtracking and Metroidvania-like exploration, so it’s possible to gain a sense of the layout of the station over time
• also, the story isn’t told especially well so I was able to not care about the characters and not be disturbed/upset by the parts that tried to hurt me, while still enjoying the lore and worldbuilding

so yeah I feel like 95% of players would find this game boring at best but I liked it so much that I’m replaying it on a harder difficulty, and I’m already finding new secrets that I missed on my first playthrough

@kasdeya I played Alien Isolation in the past year, and it ended up being one of my favorite games ever. I heard disappointing things about Rogue Incursion, but you convinced me to put it back into my backlog. I very much enjoy game worlds that are designed as if they were real spaces with a lot of thought put into how the characters live in it, even moreso recently since I've started noticing more architectural nonsensicalities in games. If the world ends up being the only thing I like about it, this alone would be worth it for me.

I might have missed a lot of what's wrong with Sevastopol Station though. I felt pretty immersed and only noticed things like elevator shafts having weird placements; a lot of them only go to one place and are off to the side in these random nooks instead of higher-traffic arteries. And also some questionable (bad) engineering, like the hanging cart that travels across the top of the synth factory, which would have been cheaper and more reliable as a simple catwalk. And the gas lines that can explode into passageways. Or the air duct that somehow vents the atmosphere into space when the alien drops down from it.

@mark_pc ooh I hope that you end up liking Rogue Incursion! it’s definitely not for everyone but it sounds like you might appreciate a lot of the same things that I did - and I also just enjoyed the atmosphere a lot too

for Alien: Isolation, I definitely remember a few times where I stopped and asked myself what a room was used for before everything went to shit and I couldn’t really figure it out

and I also remember that there’s this one specific machine that kept being reused as an objective. in one mission it was a power generator for an elevator but in another mission it was something completely different, and I think it was reused about 3-4 times as different things each time. but I could have also just been confused lol because I had a hard time understanding what Ripley’s moment-to-moment goals were in that game

@kasdeya Your mention of power generators also reminded me that humans could just walk into the fusion generator rooms, while they're running!, which should be ludicrously dangerous at best.

I think you're talking about that box that you needed to use the wrench on, and vaguely also remember being confused about its reuse. I must have given up overanalyzing the equipment by that point and accepted that Alien's retrofuturism simply does not make sense, especially from a modern lens.

I think confusion on Ripley's goals is fair, because the story's basic structure was, "drop everything and take care of all of these constant emergencies, one right after the other for many hours straight, in order to not die." And you don't really get a chance to let your guard down and breathe until about halfway through.