Final Waiting on Kickstarter for now as I’m all caught up. Two interesting ones because neither really falls into my most common category for Kickstarters which is campaign games. Instead we have a space horror survival game and a horror survival game. Maybe horror survival is another category that I like?

Nemesis

Technically the Kickstarter that I backed was for Nemesis: Lockdown. But the part I backed was going in on the original Nemesis kickstarter to get that stuff. The original Kickstarter by Awaken Realms was while I wasn’t backing as many Kickstarter games or paying as much attention as a whole to Kickstarter, but when I heard about it after the fact, I was bummed that I hand’t backed it. The way the game was described was Aliens, just without the Aliens IP (intellectual property) rights.

In this game there are aliens that have gotten aboard your ship. You need to deal with the alien nest and queen and other monsters while trying to get the ship back to Earth. But, you might not be trying to get back to Earth, depending on what your objective is. You might be trying to get to another planet, or you might be trying to get back to Earth, but Jim can’t survive, so you might encourage Jim to fight and kill some aliens that are a little bit above his pay grade in hopes that he doesn’t make it.

I like this cooperative but not cooperative idea to the game. I also like that conflict isn’t really in your face between the players. Sure, you might leave Jim in a bad spot, but you aren’t going to be pushing Jim out the airlock yourself, at least if you don’t want it to be obvious that’s what you’re doing. And the fact that you still need to win the game, get to earth and not have aliens on the ship or at least not have the next on your ship is really interesting ad really well thought out. The game is going to be way harder if Jim is dead in round two.

This really seems like my type of game, and I like that this is a game on kickstarter that I can know a lot about. There are reviews out there for it because people have it from the original kickstarter. And generally it’s really well liked as a very thematic and interesting game. I’m very excited to get this one in.

Excitement Meter: 8.5/10

The Night Cage

So the other horror survival game. This one almost more fantasy in nature, but mainly just more horror in nature. You are a group of people who wake up alone in a labyrinth with nothing but a candle. Using that light you need to navigate around the ever shifting corridors in hopes of finding a key to get out. But you have monsters to worry about and you only have a limited number of keys and portals to escape from and when your light no longer illuminates them, they are gone forever.

The Night Cage really interested me after watching it played and talked about on the GloryHoundd youtube channel. What made this one feel unique was the tension that is created as tiles slowly count down and you feel the time running out. It’s not a tension that you find in a lot of games. A whole lot more have more abrupt ends to the game, but this one even if you reach a point where you can’t win, you’ve already been feeling the pressure of time dwindling down. And the fact that all four (or five) characters stuck in the Night Cage need get keys and get to the same portal at the same time makes it intense.

The game does really well allowing you to push your luck and spread out early in the game, which will probably let you find the keys faster, but if you aren’t close to each other, it can make it harder for everyone to get to the same portal because people have having to travel from further distances away. So do you want to risk that, or do you want to stay closer together so when you find the keys you can escape faster, but you might be attacked by monsters more so. The monsters, in the base game, will attack in a straight line down the paths that they can see, so they might get you if you’re too close together.

This game works because while the theme feels like it should be kind of abstract the game plays with the tension that the theme has on it. And while it was fun on Table Top Simulator, I think it’ll be a whole lot better in person as they have really created a beautiful looking game and a beautiful way to keep track of the tiles as they are counting down.

Excitement Meter: 8/10

Which of these horror survival games seems more exciting to you? Did you back either of them on Kickstarter?

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