Space Beast Terror Fright is an Indie Science Fiction Rogue-like First-Person Shooter by Nornware AB, inspired by the aesthetics of the film Aliens and the game mechanics of the Space Hulk tabletop game. The game can be played either in single-player or in up to 4 player Cooperative Multiplayer, with players taking role of Marines in Space launching assaults on derelict space stations which have been taken over by the vicious Space Beasts. Maps are procedurally generated and tile-based.
The game was released on Steam's Early Access program in April 6th, 2015, and finally saw a full release on June 3rd, 2022. It notably predates Space Hulk: Deathwing, the official Space Hulk First-Person Shooter, by over a year, and is overall a much more faithful adaptation of the board game in terms of its unforgiving mechanics and tile-based corridor levels compared to the more mainstream, Left 4 Dead-inspired Deathwing.
Tropes:
- Blackout Basement: Power to the space station will periodically cut out during the mission, which will shut off all the lights and also disable any active sentry turrets or forcefields. To reactivate power, you need to find a breaker box and flip it.
- Bottomless Magazines: Your weapon doesn't need to be reloaded and can be fired until you run out of ammo.
- Checkpoint Starvation: Not only is there no saving in the middle of a mission, but dying during a mission causes you to permanently lose that character and any of the suit upgrades they've earned.
- Epileptic Flashing Lights: Weapons have massive muzzle flash and also cause the FOV to ping-pong in and out. The title screen even prominently warns people with epilepsy that the game will most likely "melt your face".
- Escort Mission: NPC scientists can sometimes be found hiding in saferooms (hidden behind walls in the xeno-research rooms). If you can successfully extract them, you'll receive an upgrade for your weapon. However, since they're unarmored humans, a single hit from anything will cause them to explode into bloody gibs.
- Friendly Fireproof: Averted by default; Marines can damage each other with their weapons, and turrets will also damage you if you get between them and a Space Beast. A single bullet hit won't kill you, but it will disable one of your suit systems, and a few hits will kill you. Friendly fire can be disabled in game settings.
- Glass Cannon: Marines are armed with powerful, rapid-fire weaponry, but die in a single hit from a Space Beast.
- Interface Screw: Your rifle has massive muzzle flash that obstructs you view in tense firefights, and the game will also cause the FOV to pulse in-and-out when a Space Beast is nearby. This adds up to a confusing visual mess during firefights which can cause you to make a wrong decision and get killed quickly. The opening warning screen makes it clear the game is not for people who have or may potentially have epilepsy.
- Meat Moss: More infested areas of the station will be covered in hardened alien goo similar to that seen in Aliens. More sinisterly, the Space Beasts blend in with the Meat Moss and can ambush you by lying still until you get close.
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Nintendo Hard: The game is designed to be extremely hard, with deliberately disorienting visuals during combat, One-Hit Kill gameplay, and relentless infinitely spawning enemies. It can be manageable in 4-player co-op (assuming your teammates are competent and not shooting you by accident), but single-player is an absolute nightmare as it combines all that with you having to do the work of 4 people by yourself, and you're unable to do useful things like assign someone to Overwatch a breached corridor while someone else downloads intel from a computer. - One-Hit Kill: If a Space Beast touches you, you're dead more-or-less instantly. The smaller Astro Creeps take a few hits to kill you, and also damage your suit's systems.
- P.O.V. Cam: In multi-player, you can have a small window in the corner showing the perspective from your teammates' cameras.
- Respawning Enemies: Enemies will constantly respawn from breaches in the space station's ceiling located on specific tiles. If enabled, new breaches will open up as the game progresses, making the station progressively more dangerous.
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: At the end of each level you need to overload the station's reactor by disabling the 4 cooling terminals, at which point you have a little over a minute to get back to the airlock before the whole place melts down.
- Sentry Gun: Deactivated sentry guns are located throughout each space station; they can be reactivated to lock down an area and shoot any Space Beasts that enter its line-of-sight. While quite powerful, they don't have infinite ammo and will run dry if the player takes too long before finishing the mission.
- Space Marines: You play as them; while in-game they're referred to only as "Marines", they operate in Space and their armor strongly resembles the Terran Marines from Starcraft and the Space Marines from Space Hulk.
