Alien: Rogue Incursion Makes Carrying Things Exciting?!

It’s weird what things are novel in virtual reality gaming. I’ve had the rare privilege of being able to watch the subgenre grow substantially over the years. We’ve come a long way from fighting with Skyrim on PSVR to register our height correctly. And I’m not bragging about the MMOs or Battle Royales or anything like that. No, the really impressive thing about VR is… I can finally do sensible things that would just take too many keybindings otherwise, which is most obvious in Alien: Rogue Incursion.

Like, have you ever been annoyed by an over-designed heads up display? You’ve got to keep track of everything under the sun, to the point the actual game experience is a fraction of the screen? What if… you could just set those things down?

Putting stuff down is super cool! I am 100% serious! I can put down my map tool on a desk while I’m hacking a computer, letting it play an audio log as I glance over my shoulder at an odd noise. Do I have to slice open a door? Well, better set my motion tracker on the ground behind me, where it’ll keep making consistent audio feedback with a defined radius I can rely on without looking at it. Did I find extra ammo that I inexplicably can’t carry with me? Luckily, I have two hands, and can carry the spares back to the nearest save room, where they’ll be waiting when I need them.

Later on, my Synthetic companion lost his head, literally, and so I had to carry it around. Except I realized both his head and several spare rounds of ammunition could all fit in a cardboard box. I put them in experimentally, and… yeah, it worked. I could carry multiple items at once, sensibly. This was far cooler than any cardboard box — virtual or otherwise — has any right to be.

I cannot overstate how much of a game-changer this was for me. There are extra nuances too. That ammo management can be a bit finicky, since each magazine is persistent, not magically refilling when you reload. But if you’re smart, you pop out the incomplete mag, slot in a full one, then grab the incomplete into your inventory. Then it re-adds to your resource pool. I don’t think I’ve ever thought as much about reloading as I have with Alien: Rogue Incursion, and I mean that in the best way possible.

You’ve access to two primary weapons out of the gate – your six-shooter magnum, and your pulse rifle. The magnum packs a punch but it only holds six rounds and you have to slot each one in manually when reloading. Yes, you can also do the twirl with a flourish of your wrist while cycling them back in, like the badass space cowgirl the game’s heroine absolutely is. By contrast, the pulse rifle is more reliable, but burns through ammo faster, and there’s an additional chamber-clearing lever you have to pull each time you want to reload. So neither gun is overpowered, and you can only take two hits before you’re dead.

As such, ensuring you are never without something to shoot becomes a major factor in staying alive. Sometimes your synthoid companion can cover your back, but his shotgun isn’t exactly a precision weapon. It’s on you to play things smart. Sometimes that’s priming your gear to hear an ambush coming. Other times, it’s juggling a plasma torch in one hand for opening a door, and a gun in the other, naturally looking back and forth without pausing. The amount of physical embodiment you feel is truly something on par with the likes of Half-Life: Alyx, except it’s not exclusive to a high end PC in order to be experienced. And I know not everyone’s had as smooth a time with the Quest port of the game, but I’m honestly pretty satisfied. It might not be as shiny, but the gameplay is far more impressive.

The sheer gulf of options afforded by Rogue Incursion particularly stands out when you compare the experience to Alien: Isolation with a VR mod. Is it impressive to play Isolation in VR? Absolutely. Yet the second you grow used to just inhabiting the space fully, it’s obvious how constrained Isolation’s gameplay is by the gameplay possibilities of a standard controller. That’s saying something too, as Isolation was fairly good at faking that sort of immersive play with its liberal use of lean functions. For 2014, that was plenty. Yet I don’t think I can go back now after experiencing Rogue Incursion.

Normally when someone says something like that, it’s because of some jaw-dropping innovation,  like Portal’s portals or Fallout 3’s V.A.T.S. system. I never expected the ability to simply fully harness my 3D environment and equipment to be on that level, but here we are. It even really stood out when such ideas weren’t as evident when I was playing Rogue Incursion’s peer, Metro Awakening, which struggles a lot more with properly harnessing the possibilities of VR. It would not be hard to recreate Awakening as a traditional “flat” game, but we’re reaching a point where you can’t say that about some VR games, and I’m glad.

I mean on one hand, it sucks you need several hundred dollars for a headset that uses a proprietary storefront run by Meta of all companies. On the other, being built specifically for VR means you have experiences with VR headsets that can’t be replicated easily elsewhere. As someone who still regularly uses their Wii-U because of its own exclusive features, it’s great to see an even more ambitious style of play starting to genuinely flourish. The hardware might be in something of a holding pattern, but the software is finally growing beyond its training wheels into something with its own lexicon of design sensibilities. It feels like we’re on the cusp of the kind of creative energy like that of the PlayStation 2 era of gaming, and I’m here for it.

And even if VR remains a niche sub-genre on niche hardware only enjoyed by a few, I’ll treasure the profound realization of how nice it is, in a game, to just put something down and then pick it back up when I’m ready. It’s the strangest, but most satisfying, thing.

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Elijah Beahm is an author for Lost in Cult that Unwinnable graciously lets ramble about progressive religion and obscure media. When not consulting on indie games, he can be found on BlueSky and YouTube. He is still waiting for Dead Space 4.