Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space Review

I'm a fan of Sci-fi, and a lover of Pulp, so when a game claims it's got both, I'm willing to give it a shot.

I downloaded Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space (which henceforth will be Albedo: E.F.O.S.) because I got it for free ages ago, then promptly left it on my hard-drive gathering dust. In fact, I had forgotten I had it until last week when I was looking for something new to play. Something light, nothing too taxing, no 100-hour long RPGs this time.

Albedo: E.F.O.S. seemed to fit the bill.

I took a quick look at the screenshots to remind myself what the game was and was mildly intrigued. "Looks like an old-school style adventure game" I thought to myself. "This'll do nicely." I believed.

I was wrong.

I couldn't tell if the game was trying to be humorous and failing, or serious and failing. A secret research facility with strange creatures running amok could make for an interesting horror scenario, but on the other hand, it could easily be the set-up for a satirical jaunt, poking fun at all the sci-fi of the '60s and onwards.

The creatures are monocular, tentacled monsters like the aliens from The Simpsons. So, I initially thought it was supposed to be a satire. Later, I ran in to a floating fish that served no purpose as far as I can tell, which further suggested this. But there was no joking, no comments poking fun, barring hidden nods to Star Trek and Ghostbusters, which seemed more for nods to these particular series than for any satirical purposes. So, I assumed it was a semi-serious sci-fi horror. I say assume, because the game barely tells any story. The character speaks, but mainly to lightly direct the player.

The story, what little there was, was so uninteresting, I couldn't force myself to finish the game. Normally, I can't leave a game unfinished (or book for that matter), but in this case, I couldn't force myself to care.

Moving on from the story, the graphics are probably ok, with a very '60s aesthetic to the monsters (and the flying saucers), but the game looked like someone had smeared a thin layer of Vaseline over the camera lens, making it impossible to determine for certain whether the graphics were barely passable or bad. Perhaps that was the reason they did that, who can say these days.

The controls were simply bad. Interacting being finicky, an inventory that took forever to cycle through as you accumulated more items, making fighting a creature and cycling through the inventory deadly, and interaction points on items being tiny or oddly placed in some instances.

The audio was poor, with the voice of the main character sounding like he was talking into a tin can. The music was forgettable, so much so, that I can't even recall if there even was any music.

All in all, this was a game that had the ingredients for what could have been a great little horror adventure, or a satire taking a humorous poke at sci-fi from the '60s, which were all sadly squandered.

I'm glad I got it for free, otherwise I would have felt shortchanged, no matter the price.