From K148 Game Studio and JanduSoft comes UFOPHILIA. It’s a bit like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with far less mashed potato and Teri Garr.

“UFOPHILIA is a first-person psychological horror game where you explore areas marked by alien phenomena. Use specialized equipment to detect, identify, and photograph aliens—but do so at your own risk… They are watching you too.”

The basic principle of UFOPHILIA is really quite simple. Find evidence of aliens and try to record proof that they exist. You explore a dark location, look for clues, take photos/videos, and that’s about it. As I said, that’s the basic principle, but UFOPHILIA has a bit more going on than that. There’s no story to follow along with, just a selection of different locations and several different alien species to find.

You have a small caravan that you lug from location to location. In said caravan is your equipment. You have a laptop, which you use to select your alien hunting mission, look over any gathered evidence, document the different aliens, their various attributes, and their stimuli. Some aliens respond to light, some sound, etc. Some aliens are quite timid, some inquisitive, some quite aggressive. This is where you need to know what piece of equipment to use in what situation. Thankfully, your trusty laptop also had a breakdown of what equipment does what. Some stuff is obvious, a camera take photos, but other equipment is quite specialised, and you need to make sure that you are carrying the right gadget for the right species of alien.

I found this bit of the game needlessly annoying. You see, you can only carry two pieces of equipment with you, and this means a lot of going back and forth from the location and to your caravan to swap anything out. You also have to keep going back to your caravan and your laptop to look up each alien. Why you couldn’t have some kind of portable display that holds all the info, I don’t know. Plus, you need to keep going back to your laptop to look up what piece of equipment does what. Some equipment is obvious, you know what a video camera does, but most of it is specialist and mixing up one piece of equipment with another is all too easy. I don’t know why you, as an (in-game) alien expert, doesn’t automatically know what piece of equipment does what. Something as simple as hovering the cursor over an item, and a tooltip popping up with the information of each piece of equipment. This would’ve cut the need to keep going back to your laptop.

This is my biggest bugbear with UFOPHILIA, the fact that you have to keep going back and forth to your caravan and your laptop (a lot). It breaks up what the game does really damn well, the actual searching for and finding aliens. When you are in the locations and walking around the dark, atmospheric corridors, searching rooms and such, it’s really effective and has you on edge as you don’t know if you’re going to find a friendly/curious alien, or a more aggressive/violent one… or nothing. The tense atmosphere is done very well, and when you do find evidence of an alien… you have to go back to your caravan, back to your laptop and look up which alien it might be, look at what equipment does what, etc. This breaks the immersion. Again, having a portable display that you can look at while in the location, and having a backpack full of equipment would’ve removed the need to keep returning to your laptop and kept you in that scary atmosphere that the game does so well.

UFOPHILIA is out now for PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch, and for a reasonable price of around £10. There are only a few locations in the game, and you will play the same ones over and over. But the game does have a random element in that you won’t know which alien is there or exactly where they are, so every time that you do play the same location, it will be different. With only seven locations and nine different aliens to find, things will get a tad repetitive, even with the random element, and all the constant going back to your caravan is annoying. Still, despite the flaws, UFOPHILIA is worth a few hours of your time.