This sci-fi horror game is trying to make Area 51’s little grey men scary again
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Sci-fi is one of the less sung about subgenres in horror games, at least when compared to the wealth of zombie-infested titles out there. However, these numbers will rise in 2023, when a few little gray men come to town.
The Refugium Games trailer for the upcoming survival horror game Greyhill Incident shows early ’90s America in the throes of an alien invasion, stripping the “extra” out of the otherworldly by setting the scene here on Earth.
It will have to compete with reboots from some of the best horror gameswith Resident Evil 4 scheduled for release in March 2023. But if the Greyhill Incident trailer is anything to go by, we should prepare for an entirely unique experience in Refugium’s debut title.
Beam me up
You play as Ryan Baker, and according to the Greyhill Incidents Steam page (opens in new tab), he is just an ordinary man in the early 90s in the US. While others dredge the conspiracy theories of the panicked media in the post-cold war era, Ryan quickly realizes that he and his neighbors in Greyhill are at the center of a much bigger, much more deadly lie than anyone could have imagined. .
“Equipped with a baseball bat and a few bullets in his revolver, the story takes you through the atmospheric neighborhood of Greyhill – invaded by UFOs and grizzled aliens,” the synopsis reads.
Greyhill Incident, coming to both PC and console players, appears to feature a lot of logic puzzles. You are expected to shout at items and solve them if you want to reunite with your neighbors to fight for survival amidst the alien invasion of your once silent city.
The aliens in question are curious little gray men. Little is the operative word here; combine their diminutive height with those stereotypical almond-shaped eyes and slits for nostrils, and one on its own actually looks rather comical. Only when they begin to approach en masse will the fear really set in.
The trailer doesn’t show as many examples of combat as it does taking out and then fleeing from these gray-skinned visitors. It could be that Greyhill Incident has an element of defenselessness, using hidden mechanics rather than all-out gunfights as seen in the Amnesia games (although this could change in Amnesia: The Bunker, where the main character will be armed with a gun).
2023 is a year that already seems packed when it comes to survival horror, so Greyhill Incident won’t be alone. With the Dead Space Remake and Killer Klowns From Outer Space which also meet the sci-fi standards, we can’t wait to see how Refugium’s maiden voyage compares to the items already on our wishlist.