Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure

Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is a 1995 adventure video game developed for PC by Cryo and published by Mindscape. It’s somewhat based on the Aliens comic book series from Dark Horse and there are many references to the graphics novel Aliens: Labyrinth.

You play as the role of Lt. Col. Henry Hericksen, an ex-Colonial Marine on the USS Sheridan spacecraft. He is now in charge of a three-man terraforming team. You need to investigate the cause of a strange distress signal which is located on remote outpost B54C. You find a mining facility and have to collect evidence to find out what experiments have taken place.

Development

Back in 1994, Jean Martial Lefranc, CEO of Cryo Interactive, asked video game game developer, Nicholas Choukroun, to form a team to make an adventure game based on a Dark Horse Aliens comic. Fox gave Mindscape authorisation to publish the game on condition that it wouldn’t feature any characters from the films and that the game would have a realistic movie style.

The Dark Horse Aliens comics definitely inspired the development team to create a good adventure game. The game’s main character – Lt. Col. Henricksen was named after actor Lance Henricksen who played Bishop in the Alien films.

A Playstation version was planned but cancelled after the negative reception it received on PC.

Covers

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Magazine Articles

Reception

Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure received mostly negative reviews upon its release. PC Gamer scored it 59% praising the graphics and cutscenes but criticising the terrible voice acting, dialog and timed puzzles. “And it’s a shame, too, because the problems in Aliens seem to be the result of oversights and a lack of consideration for the gamer. Shoddy dialog, poor character interaction, lousy voice-overs and crummy sound effects are just a few of the things that keeps this title from being a winner.”

In a retrospective article about Alien games in general, Polygon was more positive about it: “In a reprieve from all the shooting and exploding, developer Mindscape’s point-and-click adventure not only made the Aliens feel scary, but added a little more to the franchise by spinning different plot threads through the game.” VentureBeat commented that it was a terrible excuse of a game that you shouldn’t even try to play.