Nemesis

I’ll say the obvious thing first, this wears its Alien influence openly, and yeah, so what, borrowing that theme isn’t a knock against it when the execution is this good. What actually sets Nemesis apart from just being a licensed-feeling knockoff is the noise system, every action you take can generate sound tokens that draw the creature toward you, and not knowing exactly how much health any given monster has left turns every encounter into genuine dread rather than a math problem. That uncertainty is the whole game working as intended.

Hidden objectives are doing a lot of the tension-building too, everyone’s got a secret goal that might directly conflict with the person standing next to them in the corridor, and the game gives you just enough hand management and card play to bluff, stall, or straight-up sabotage a crewmate without it feeling like a bolted-on traitor mechanic. It earns the paranoia rather than just declaring it.

The dice are where people’s patience runs out, and I’ve had it happen to me too, there are stretches where you can’t land a hit on anything no matter how favorable the odds look on paper, one bad run and your gun might as well not exist. There’s not a lot built in to mitigate that variance either, so if you’re someone who needs a game to smooth out luck for you, this’ll frustrate you at some point, probably at the worst moment.

Solo and full co-op modes were promised early and, going by what backers have said, took a while to catch up to where the core competitive-co-op experience already was at launch. If you’re buying this specifically to solo it, look into the current state of that mode first. As a table game with real people plotting against each other in the dark, though, this delivers a horror experience almost nothing else in my collection matches.