Ateam of three thieves sneak through a cavernous spaceship. They tangle with the ship’s guards, some of them wrapped in mech exoskeletons that resemble the power loader from the end of Aliens, and with other player-controlled squads with similarly felonious intent. Grenades are thrown out that blossom into clumpy walls of goo. Grappling hooks launch the thieves at speed through low-gravity environments. Finally, a safe-cracking device is attached to the vault they’re here to rob, lasers drawing a molten line around the door’s perimeter. It falls open, revealing the thieves’ prize: a cassette with a hand-written label and a doodle of a disco ball. All this for a mixtape?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, Hyenas comes from the same part of Creative Assembly that previously created Alien Isolation, with around half of the 150 developers on this game coming across, including multiple leads. That was the team that, lest we forget, once transferred elements of Isolation’s UI onto VHS tape and then back, to achieve the perfectly imperfect analogue fuzz. Seeing the future through the lens of the past has always been a clear fascination here, and while it couldn’t look much less like the Sevastopol, this new spaceship is like a temple to that same mindset. Instead of blocky CRT terminals and steely architecture lifted from Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, here we’re faced with a colossal recreation of a Roland TR-808 drum machine that towers overhead, and an Atari-themed arcade populated with real machines, the wonderfully garish art running up the side of a Centipede cabinet unmistakable as our thieves rush past.
These are just a few of the details elided in our initial description of events. Perhaps we should have mentioned that the gunfight with a rival squad played out on a staircase decorated like the walk-on piano from Big, the oversized keys lighting up under players’ feet as they strafe and slide. Or that the safe-cracking device is housed within the familiar black shell of a Mega Drive, which emits a startup chime to indicate its laser cutters are coming online. Which sounds, inevitably, like this: “SEGAAA”.
In the context of the game’s story, these items are relics of a ruined Earth, in the process of being shuttled to Mars on the whims of its billionaire inhabitants. (Or, in the case of the Mega Drive, salvaged from its wreckage and repurposed by an underclass who want their damn stuff back.) In the context of the game’s development, however, they’re representations ofcreators decided to give themselves in taking on the project.
