Alpha Polaris (2015)

THE THING about this game is that it starts with an injured animal visiting a remote, arctic research center before the supernatural horror descends. Some would argue that THE THING this game sets out to do has been done before and done better. I say yeah, sure. Still, THE THING this game set out to do, it does OK.

The story is decent enough. There's some good moments of creepiness and one good jump scare. Some of the puzzle solutions are annoying but for the most part, they're reasonable. It worked fine on my Deck.

I’d been intending to play this game since the time of its retail release (over a decade ago!); I came to think of it again while reading about the Wintermute Engine. Turns out that the devs released it on Steam in 2015 (once they ended their relationship with their German publisher) and then made it free in early 2020 (following the closure of Turmoil Games as a legal entity).

Turmoil Games were a small group of young, enthusiastic, and inexperienced developers based in northern Finland who created Alpha Polaris over two years. A 2015 Reddit post by one of the team members, detailing a few things they learnt during the process, is worth reading.

I might write a full review later in the week. It’s not bad for a debut game, if you like traditional graphical adventures – I think the Grouvee users who tagged it as ‘Trash’ and ‘Fucking bullshit’ were needlessly harsh. (Although apparently Super Mario 64 has been classed as the former, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent the latter, so…)