The same thing can happen in Nemesis, leaving a puddle of raspberry jelly and a freshly hatched creeper where once stood a human being. So it goes when you don’t head to the surgery room as soon as a space monster roots around your esophagus with its multi-jawed proboscis.
Of course, even this doesn’t come across as truly horrific. When your character makes too much noise and summons a queen from the depths of the ship’s utility level, you won’t kick your chair to the floor and leap from the table. Maybe you’ll swear. But scream? That’s a tall order.
Still, when it comes to tension, there’s plenty to go around here. And while you’re creeping through corridors to avoid drawing the attention of the game’s aliens, Nemesis is leveraging an even more potent agent—its players.
Fires, broken computers, and the cold hard vacuum of space
At first, the business of surviving feels pretty much as you’d expect. When you start, you don’t actually know the specific layout of the ship. The helm is located up front and the engines are back at the stubby end, but beyond that you can’t seem to recall whether the hibernatorium is adjacent to the cafeteria or the escape pods. Is this amnesia? Awakening sickness?
OK, it’s a little silly—even on a regular airline flight they take pains to point out the exits, and there you’re just sitting in a plain aluminum cylinder rather than a sprawling space vessel—but the gameplay in Nemesis actually benefits from this sense of dislocation. For the most part, your job is to uncover the ship, scrounge together the stuff you need to survive, and ensure you get home with all your bits attached. This usually entails checking the engines, fixing some stuff, maybe reentering the ship’s coordinates, and climbing back into hibernation. But because the ship’s layout is unknown, you’re feeling your way through the dark. Nothing is certain.
