Ah, the El Obscuro File. Home of so many unjustly forgotten little
gems, games that didn’t quite get the hype or distribution they deserved. Games
you want to share with your fellow hard-core adventure hounds.

Unfortunately,
lurking in the E.O. File are also games that are obscure For A Reason. Or even,
for Many Reasons. The game we consider today is in that unhappy category.

Alien
Virus is a 1994 DOS, first-person, point-and-click adventure developed by
Nova Spring and published by Vic Tokai, Inc., a company that has to its credit
many console action games but very very few PC games.

The premise is overly
familiar, though not a game killer; it’s basically the same story as the original
film Alien. Your character, Joshua, is dispatched to a space station to
make some deliveries. Your girlfriend is also working on this station. While you’re
en route, the stations gets infected with a mysterious–you guessed it!–Alien
Virus. Okay, so this isn’t so very different from the plot of System Shock
2, which is a great game, so I’m not going to blame the story.

For what
looks and plays like a garage game, the graphics are pleasing and competent without
being spectacular or special in any way. When you encounter other characters,
they have a pleasing comic-book look (a look I wish was used in more games, frankly–I
loved it in Hopkins FBI). This in itself is also not a game killer. I enjoyed
the modest graphic look of the game.

And the game starts off well. When
you land on the space station there’s an out-of-commission information robot in
front of you who can’t help you out until you find a way to fix him. When you
do, he begins filling in the backstory for you.

One mistake the game doesn’t
make is that it doesn’t beat you over the head with the exposition. You don’t
have to spend inordinate amounts of time listening to audio logs or reading journals.
The story, like the game itself, is lean and mean.

Actually, the game is
so modest that it uses a bare minimum of screens, which in a first-person game
is very noticeable and adds to the feeling of Alien Virus being a garage
game. For instance, you virtually never turn around in the game. You click on
a door to go to the next room, in which you’re now standing facing the same direction.
To return to the previous room, you click in the appropriate hotspot and you’re
back where you started, still facing the same way. This lack of rotation takes
some getting used to.

For the first third of the game, the puzzles are entertaining
and logical. Fix the robot, find the keycard to open the door, get the elevator
to work, etc. But the game takes a very bad left turn somewhere in the middle,
and the puzzles begin to get more and more illogical. I think my favorite involved
putting some grease on the floor in an air shaft in anticipation of a monster
you didn’t know was about to appear. You also have to turn on a lamp to get
the monster to appear, which flatly contradicts the logic of the story (the monsters
cannot tolerate light). However, without triggering this nonsensical cutscene,
the game stops dead. It’s the sort of thing that makes me throw up my hands and
reach for a walkthrough.

These loopy puzzle solutions scuttle an otherwise
promising, modest little science fiction adventure. It’s a shame because, like
haunted houses and detective stories, I’m always willing to try another adventure
game with a science fiction setting; it’s one of the types of stories computer
games do best. Pity.

For the record, though it’s a DOS game, it installed
on my modern computer with no muss, no fuss.

Final Grade: D

If
you liked Alien Virus:
Watch: Alien
Read: Traveler
in Night by C.J. Cherryh
Play: System Shock 2

System
Requirements: IBM compatible PC
4 MB RAM

SVGA VESA 1.x compatible graphics card with at least 256 KB RAM
CD-ROM with
MSCDEX-compatible driver loaded into RAM
20 MB free space on hard disk

Mouse