They say that curiosity killed the cat, but it also also starts off many of the better adventures and stories which are out there.
While Project X: Aliens isn’t high-literature, it features a decent story in a genre which tends to pass them over.
Juliette Amorati’s Project X: Aliens puts you in the role of a curious scientist who, tired of missing out on all the fun, takes a look at the upstairs floor where they are working on hazardous materials. As it turns out, the materials they were working on were from a recent asteroid impact, and everybody is strangely missing except weird alien lifeforms. The aliens are curious creatures, and through a series of mishaps or oversights, they seem to have overrun the floor.
At its core, Project X: Aliens is a simple block pusher with some smart enemy designs. Some enemies move toward you, others move away from you, and you can alter their states and kill them. What is nice, however, is the little story moments which fill the space between the levels; A somewhat basic, but still definitely present, story is told through scraps of letters you find as you complete stages. Each offers tutorials on the new mechanics and also discusses the journey of the main character in their search for their friend Daniel.
It’s just well done. It’s easy for us to celebrate environmental storytelling in games, but sometime there is a need for a decent tutorial, or even just some story to paste a situation together. Sometimes that can only be done through text or speech, and in the case of the Puzzlescript engine, it can only be the former. Still, it’s easy enough for people to pass over the opportunity to portray a story – even a seemingly-basic one – and the game is better that the developer chose not to.
Project X: Aliens can be played in the browser, and is available over on itch.io.
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