Unfortunate Spacemen is a Survival Horror chiefly-mulitplayer game by Geoff Keene and Sandswept Studios, published by New Blood Interactive. Centered around the exploits of some employees of an interstellar corporation known as The Company, it has a few different gameplay modes available:
- By far the most popular mode is its Shapeshifter mode, an Asymmetric Multiplayer Social Deduction Game mode where a crew of spacemen are working on an outpost that has come under an emergency, needing to complete tasks before they are allowed to evacuate. This is because one of them is actually a shapeshifting alien monster whose goal is to kill all of the spacemen before they can kill it or escape. A later update added a Traitor role, where one of the humans is also an undercover agent from a group known as the BRIGADE who seeks to take down The Company by assisting the monster any way they can. Think Among Us meets Alien as a First-Person Shooter.
- A story mode where one or more players are sent in by The Company to check out a distress beacon at a Company site, who must fight their way through waves of Crumerian aliens to achieve their goals before they can return to safety.
- A survival mode where one or more players have to hold out as long as they can against increasingly-larger waves of Crumerian aliens.
The game was released on June 12th, 2020.
Always remember, humans — one of these tropes is worth more than your whole life! So don't forget them:
Tropes common across all modes
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Crumerian aliens. They take a few different forms, but the most common ones encountered are at least somewhat based on Earth insects in terms of having four segmented legs that crawl up to you to attack, as well as being spawned in from hives planted by the Monster in Shapeshifter games. Story and Survivor modes also include flying ones that spit acid at you from a distance.
- Blinded by the Light: Seeing a flashbang go off in your face turns your P.O.V. solid white. The Monster can use this to shapeshift while everyone is impaired; Spaceman can also use it to force a disguised monster to lose their disguise if they get caught in the flash.
- Booby Trap: Both Spacemen and the Monster have access to them. Spacemen can plant trip mines that stick to surfaces and send out a trip laser that, when it detects an enemy, explodes — great for planting next to air vent entrances that Monsters like to use. Monsters can lay egg-like bombs of either acid or electromagnetism that set off when a Spaceman gets too close.
- Bottomless Magazines: Generally Averted, as each firearm can only shoot so many shots before they overheat and need to cool down. However, some weapons do cool down gradually if they haven't reached their limit and aren't being used, though using the reload button to fully discharge the heat sink is quicker for a weapon at its limit. On the other hand, there is no need for picking up spare ammo in this game to top off one's ammo count as once the weapon's been cooled off it's ready to go again. The rocket launcher is limited to single-use only in Shapeshifter games, but not in Story or Survivor.
- Color-Coded Multiplayer: Each player is randomly assigned a different color at the start of each match. On all maps in Shapeshifter mode except for The Experiment that color is how the players are identified rather than their gamertag username from Steam.
- Company Cross References:
- The game has cosmetic gear that can be gained through purchasing other games by New Blood Interactive, such as the mask of a cultist from DUSK, the helmet of the protagonist of AMID EVIL, and Gabriel's helmet (along with voice clips) and a monster skin based off of V1 from ULTRAKILL.
- "Spaceburbia" has a poster of the Final Boss of DUSK, Nyarlathotep.
- Coop Multiplayer: The Spacemen all have the same goal: get off the map alive.
- Disposable Intern: Between the way The Company treats them as expendable (mainly through the Spokesman's verbal callousness over how he values Company property over lives) and its training scripts for the tutorial level with a half-hearted effort, The Company clearly doesn't think all that much of its employees.
- Eerie Arctic Research Station:
- Outpost 13, an Homage for the Antarctic base where the events of The Thing take place, including a kennel. Thankfully, Spacemen don't have to deal with infected dogs in this game.
- The first map of the story mode campaign sends the players to a snow-covered area where they need to investigate a facility owned by The Company that's stopped responding to HQ — naturally, it's been overrun with Crumerians. This extends to the Shapeshifter version of the map Containment.
- Featureless Protagonist: Zigzagged. The spacemen wear their suits all the time, and their space helmets' visors block any/all view of their faces to others.
- Insectoid Aliens: The Crumerians which crawl or fly around and attack humans with apparent animal-level intelligence. In addition, the Company itself has the Spokesperson be essentially an eight-foot-tall arthropod with about a dozen limbs and dressed with a bowtie when you see him in person in Story Mode, who doesn't always remember that human anatomy isn't the same as his own.
- Limited Loadout: Spacemen are restricted to carrying two weapons and one gadget item.
- MegaCorp: The Company, with a sprawling empire of mining and research operations across many planets and their own private fleet of spaceships to shuttle personnel to and from them.
- No OSHA Compliance: The Company doesn't have worker safety high on its priorities.
- Several maps have high places where the railings that ought to prevent people slipping off to their deaths are either missing or broken (admittedly, some of these are cases where an accident happened that left holes in the structure). An unwary Spaceman can be pushed to their deaths by sneaky-enough Traitors or disguised Monsters.
- The Emergency Material Ejectors on Shapeshifter maps allow for the unwary to get shoved inside and launched to their death.
- Getting crushed by someone turning on the garbage compactor while someone is inside it because they have to walk in to set down the collected debris from a landing pad.
- Off with His Head!: One death animation includes a character's head coming clean off.
- Oxygen Meter: Some parts of maps are places where humans cannot stay indefinitely because of hostile environments, like the cold vacuum of outer space. Their suits will have an oxygen meter that gradually drains towards zero, at which point they start taking health damage and could die by asphyxiation if they don't get back to an oxygenated area in time. Monsters don't have to deal with this issue.
- P.O.V. Cam: The default view of players is a first-person perspective, though an option exists to switch to a third-person view from behind the player's shoulder.
- Sentry Gun: Can be picked up on maps and deployed to provide some covering fire against the transformed Monster and Crumerian aliens.
- Shapeshifter: The Monster can shift between human and alien form. In addition, it can take on the form of players that it has consumed.
- Survival Horror: Given that the Monster is significantly stronger and faster than any individual Spaceman, trying to take the Monster on head-on is very likely to result in the Spaceman's death, especially if they don't have heavy weapons. Given that the Monster's abilities are designed to ambush its targets and then run, it makes playing as a Spaceman at least a little bit nerve-wracking.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted in this game. Though they have a short range, since all your enemies are organic in nature they tend to deplete their health fairly quickly if they're caught in the flames, and continue to take damage even after they get out of the stream. In addition, flamethrowers can also roast any Monster or Traitor who happens to be hiding in the particular air vent you're targeting if they can't escape quickly enough — there's an achievement for killing the Monster this way. They're also quite efficient at destroying Company computers, able to quickly wipe all the drives on a server with half a canister.
- The Voiceless: Steve, whom the Spokesperson often refers to but is never once heard, either over the radio when the Spokesperson is talking to you or during the one time at the end of the third Story mission where you meet him in person on the escape shuttle. He is implied to be a Silent Snarker by the way the Spokesperson might ask about the way he's looking at him after a tribunal vote in Shapeshifter.
Tropes specific to Shapeshifter mode
- Air Vent Escape: The Monster and the Traitor can hop into various air vent gates to move about the map quickly. Like in Among Us, only the Monster and Traitor can use them, so they best take care not to be seen using them either by Spacemen or cameras.
- Anti-Frustration Features: To prevent griefers or Sore Loser humans dragging out the game unnecessarily, if only one innocent Spaceman is left alive, the shuttle will come in to land regardless of whether all tasks have been complete and will leave after one minute. This will force the last survivor to run for the shuttle, as failure to make it on board in time will result in their death — if the Monster happens to be on board when the doors close, they can rip down the cockpit door and hijack the controls for a Monster win.
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: A bunch of Spacemen on one side versus a killer alien Monster and possibly a Traitor on the other. At full capacity it can end up being 14 versus 2, with the 2 having special skills to help them out a bit.
- Cut the Juice: Monsters and Traitors can sabotage the map's power to hinder the Spacemen by making some tasks (launching sealed samples, turning on transmitters) unable to be completed and rendering teleporters, transmitters, E.M.E.'s, and the weapon vending machine useless until power can be restored.
- Destroy the Security Camera: There are security cameras strewn about each of the maps that all players can use to see what might be going on elsewhere on the map. The Monster can destroy them to make it harder for the spacemen to track its movements; the Traitor can use the perks Red Alert (all cameras blocked until Traitor is killed) or Flasher (cameras that are flashed are destroyed) to disable cameras as well, along with just shooting them if they can avoid being caught doing so.
- Disposing of a Body:
- The Monster can eat the corpse of killed Spacemen to dispose of the body so that its color can't be reported as "dead" (and thus render the Monster unable to shapeshift into that particular color without arousing suspicion). Eating the body will also give the Monster health, unless the Spaceman has the Antibodies perk.
- A later update made the "clean the landing pad of debris" task more complicated by requiring Spacemen to carry a garbage bag filled with debris to a trash compactor and squeeze it into a cube so that it can be launched via E.M.E. Typical of Company safety culture, the compactor machine requires that the Spaceman walk inside the machine to set down the bag — another can activate the machine while that unfortunate spacemen is inside to trap them and get crushed to death along with the debris, which still must be launched to complete the task even with mangled human limbs mixed in among the metal scraps.
- Dwindling Party: As more Spacemen are killed, fewer of them are left to run around to provide you with backup. And one of them could be the Monster itself...
- Impostor-Exposing Test: The medical station and trip mines have the ability to detect whether the person in front of it detects alien parasites, i.e., is not human. This isn't foolproof, however — medical stations and trip mines will also alert when used by humans that have been infected with parasites, and medical stations can further be fooled by a Monster using a detached limb to remotely trigger it when an innocent Spaceman is using it. Health syringes used on a disguised Monster will force the Monster to transform right there, revealing them to everyone present.
- Locomotive Level: The Hypertain map, appropriately enough, is a moving train IN SPACE!. The level consists of several cars in a line, though with the three landing pads used for evacuation spaced out evenly and a teleporter to allow for quick moving from the front end to the back it isn't as tedious as it could be to finish all tasks — unless the power is out.
- The Mole: Both the Monster and the Traitor look like regular Spacemen to start. They can do tasks like regular Spacemen to convince others they're not suspicious, even though it does help the Spacemen complete their tasks faster.
- Mook Maker: One option for a Monster loadout is to lay hatcheries which will spawn Crumerian aliens that will wander the map looking for Spacemen to slaughter. If not destroyed, they will eventually get bigger and spawn tougher aliens.
- Noob Bridge: Since the Monster can disguise as any color but cannot change what class or gear they spawn in as once the round starts, more experienced players call out what gear the Monster has rather than the color.
- Paying for Air: Implied on the Duress map, where the shuttles that loop around on rails from station to station proudly proclaim that the oxygen on board is generously provided free by The Company.
- Remixed Level: The Recruitment map is essentially an expanded version of the level where the game's first tutorial for learning how to play as a regular Spacemen takes place, while the Architects map is likewise one for where the second tutorial for learning how to play as the Monster takes place. The Containment map is essentially the first part of the first Story mode map, presumably taking place prior to the events of Story mode as the glass door beyond the garage and the main first door remain closed.
- Shout-Out: The Tidal Lock map includes a diamond-shaped sign done in the style of the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign seen at the entrance to the Las Vegas Strip.
- Space Station: Three of the maps (Duress, Echo, Tidal Lock) are space stations up in orbit around planets. Definitely adds to the horror atmosphere when you're a spaceman trying to get off before the Monster kills you.
- Spot the Impostor: Sometimes a Monster disguised as a security bot can give themselves away because they're carrying something real security bots don't carry, like medic backpacks or large-caliber railguns.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: Some maps have emergency airlocks that can be armed so that, when triggered, those in the danger zone are blown out at high speed to their deaths. Janitors can cross armed airlocks without setting them off; the Magnetic Boots perk allows users to stand in the danger zone and not die as their boots keep their feet planted on the floor.
- Two-Keyed Lock: Restoring the power to a map functions like this, since two generators need to be restarted within a short time of each other and they're too far apart for one person to hit one and then run to the other in time. This requirement is lifted if only one Spaceman is alive.
- Underwater Base: The aptly-named H2O map takes place in and just outside one perched on the edge of an underwater cliff.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Spacemen who wantonly kill other Spacemen (unless the one killed had been marked as "suspicious" either by actions caught on camera or being voted such at a tribunal) that turn out to not be the Monster or Traitor are marked as murderers. They forfeit 10 from their maximum health and oxygen meter, and the Monster will be able to see their location at all times.
- Visual Pun: The Space Bar map is set at a drinking bar whose sign at the front is a giant spacebar (as in the long thing at the bottom of your keyboard).
- The Walls Are Closing In: Once all of the debris on a landing pad is collected, it must be crushed into a cube at a garbage compactor before being launched. The compactor requires the carrier go inside and set the garbage bag down before exiting and starting the process, but a sneaky Monster or Traitor can activate the machine before the garbage carrier can exit and doom them to an inevitable death by crushing (the mangled body will even be in the resulting garbage cube).
- Weld the Lock: Players in the Engineer class can weld security doors shut with a handheld arc welder so that if a Monster wants to get through they'll have to smash their way even if they have an admin-level keycard that could override a security door locked the normal way. Notice that it's "Players" — a Traitor or disguised Monster can also weld doors shut to isolate and trap victims in a room along with the Monster, or weld a door to the outside closed to trap Spacemen outside and leave them with no way to get to oxygen before suffocating.
- You Are Number 6: The Experiment map labels players by number rather than color like in other maps.
- Zombie Apocalypse: One particular perk of the Monster can turn those killed into zombies that wander around the map and melee attack Spacemen. This includes security bots, for some reason.
Tropes specific to Story and Survival modes
- Abandoned Laboratory: The second stage of Story mode has the Spacemen make their way through an abandoned Company lab over an open magma chamber where portals were being experimented with and tested in order to activate one to get to the Speaker so that they can be picked up.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The third stage of Story mode takes place aboard the Speaker, as the Crumerians followed the Spacemen through the activated portal and begin to invade the Company ship. The Spacemen, Spokesperson, and Steve have to get to the bridge in order to make an emergency jump to get out of there.
- Bug War: Given all players are on the same side in these modes and they are fighting against the Crumerians, gameplay feels more like this as all the humans cooperate to fend off the waves of insectlike aliens trying to stop them from reaching their goals.
- Captain Crash: At the start of the second stage of Story mode, the gravely (maybe fatally) wounded pilot of the shuttle that was sent to pick you up in the previous stage which came crashing down notes that this was the third time this month that happened. Though it could also be the simple fact that such crashes (here caused by giant alien tentacles that managed to grab ahold of your shuttle) are commonplace due to the Company's callousness of its property over human lives.
- Eldritch Abomination: Turns out to be the form of the CEO of The Company, appearing like a monstrous squid-like spacefaring being several times the size of planets and eats them like cookies. Thankfully, it's ultimately benevolent in its lone appearance at the very end of the story campaign as it consumes the Crumerian hive planet to clean it up and get rid of a major threat.
- Outrun the Fireball: What happens at the end of the story campaign after the bomb is planted in the heart of the Crumerian hive in the cavern — once the railcart meant to carry the players to safety is activated the bomb with detonate and the edge of the fireball will keep pace with the cart as it's speeding for the exit.
