This is just a nice, calm game about listening to signals from outer space. There isn't actually anything out there... right?
- Though this game isn't billed as a horror game, it manages to combine an oppressive atmosphere, subtle horror, Mind Screw, and plenty of Hell Is That Noise and Brown Note to be legitimately scary - especially to those who have a fear of aliens or alien abductions.
- Of course, this being a game about hunting for extraterrestrial life, there are plenty of unidentified objects that a player might occasionally spot out over the desert. Sometimes they're just the station's resupply helicopter, or weather balloons... but not always.
- The signals themselves can range from "unnerving" to "utterly fucking terrifying." Made worse because many of them are based on real stellar recordings picked up by SETI in the past. Many of those pants-shitting, Silent Hill-esque Brown Notes actually existed and were captured on recording at one point in time.
- The long, long stretches of Nothing Is Scarier. There is no music and minimal audio outside of the signals and the ambient noise of the machines, so the long stretches of silence, combined with the vast, empty desert your SETI arrays occupy, can lead to a lot of paranoia and discomfort. Especially at night. Especially if you have to trek out to a distant array to fix it... at night.
- The desert isn't entirely empty. You can find a recorder with its own set of Hell Is That Noise, a discarded shoe that will get you stalked by a Flying Saucer, and an alien "corpse" that will get stashed in a tube in the console room. Oh, and it's also Not Quite Dead.
- You have no reason to ever go into the warehouse out in the desert. If curiosity gets the better of you, you might be somewhat alarmed to find it full of fucking Xenomorph eggs. Some of which have hatched.
- Sometimes, when it's not being watched, the display of your console can flash a brief image of a Grey spying on you from the doorway leading to your living area. When you turn around, nothing is there. Usually.
- You can also catch a glimpse of one watching you from the window in front of the console... or the window outside the sleeping area... or the one outside the bathroom.
- You can also occasionally find one tampering with something in the garage or maintenance shed. Though you can't see these ones, they do make some delightful noises.
- Not all signals are random noise and gibberish. When decoded some signals may actually produce coherent text, ranging from excepts from a series of disturbing Apocalyptic Logs to incidental communications, to code that somehow grants blueprints for upgrades. And then there are the ones that invite... "guests."
- The event signals are the closest things the game has to explicit, in-your-face scares, but they're not outright dangerous. They don't even really do much. They're just... there.
- The Tripod. A signal translates to a quote from War Of The Worlds, which summons a literal fucking Tripod on the horizon of the desert. Fortunately, all it does is stare... and make horrible noises.
- Two sets of signals can summon actual Borg cubeships, that hover and rotate ominously for a while before fading away. One signal summons one of them. Another signal summons... quite a bit more than one. And of course, they make horrible noises.
- There are a set of signals that are simply Emergency Broadcasts warning of a potentially-hostile Alien Invasion. They don't trigger visitors - usually - but are no less terriying for the implications.
- You can get a morse code message... that translates to "Target Neutralized." A few moments later, a UFO crashes just outside of the base. It's less "scary" and more "startling", especially compared to the other event signals, but it's still going to take away an unaware player's peace of mind... especially since the UFO wreck will stay there for the rest of the game. Worst of all? If the distance and perspective are accurate, the downed ship is the size of a mountain.
- But none of them, none of them compare to the sheer, visceral horror that is the infamous Black Triangle Ship. A disturbing signal, in a game full of disturbing signals, that translates to a single garbled message: "We come in peace." This is accompanied by the appearance of a colossal, rotating black-and-red triangle-shaped ship descending over the observatory, taking the sound the signal was making and "making it a thousand times worse." The typical reaction at this point is either a), panic and run screaming out of the base, or b), cower in the server room until the noise stops. There's something about the ship's visual design, the highly-disturbing audio, and that simple, off-putting message that inspires a deep sense of dread that even modern horror games struggle to capture. In a game filled with creepy audio and unnerving Mind Screw moments, the Black Triangle Ship stands out as one of the crowning highlights. For extra bonus night-terror points, one of the fragmented Apocalyptic Logs that some signals will decode into tell the point-of-view of an unfortunate abductee of this particular ship and... let's just say their offer of peace should probably not be trusted.
