Aliens Don’t Exist (PC)

Aliens Don’t Exist is a game where you play as an alien, so immediately, the title entices us with a mystery about why it would assert there are no aliens despite the clear and immediate presence of one the moment you start playing. Unfortunately, there is no answer to why the game has such a paradoxical name, nor does it really do anything in the way of story at all. Aliens Don’t Exist is purely a platformer about hopping around rocks in space as an alien and you are given no explanation as to why it is doing so.

Aliens Don’t Exist focuses purely on the gameplay, and it’s a very simple form of gameplay as well. The somewhat melancholic looking alien you play as has two skills, the first being a leap that gets the job done when it comes to the game’s platforming challenges and the second being a short range teleport. The alien’s teleportation skill is pretty much the game’s main gimmick, it able to go about twice as high as a jump but also allowing the alien to appear on the other side of pillars or pop up on the other side of platforms above or below it. You also have the means to teleport diagonally, this essentially serving as your long jump at some points since you get to clear a bit more space through doing it over the regular jump. The teleport can lead to kinetic stages where teleporting quickly to avoid danger is important, but it also has use in slowly navigating more complicated arrangements, some areas of the game even having zones the alien can’t teleport into to force the player to find a new way to the level’s exit.

Sadly, despite the teleportation gimmick being the game’s defining feature and leading to its better moments of level design, it’s more than a little finicky. When it’s first introduced to you, you have a small targeting reticle that shows you just where your alien will appear after the teleport is executed, but the later levels strip this away, perhaps under the assumption you understand the mechanic well enough to fly solo. Sadly, the mechanic isn’t really tight enough to justify taking away the helpful indicator. The first issue with teleporting in general is you must be moving as you execute it if it’s a diagonal or forward version of it. You can be just slightly moving to make it work, but the fact it is done while in motion means your aim might be a little off. There are moments where the game expects a pretty precise teleport, the threat of death awaiting you if you mess up even slightly, so the need for a running start only leads to this being a bigger issue than one might expect. Death only resets the level you’re in and they’re all pretty short stages, but it is annoying to have the teleportation fail so often. The precision also gets worse when you’re trying to teleport onto the other side of wall, where you might not be close enough to reach the other side but can’t identify if the teleport failed because of your position or because of the controls, leading to wonky experimentation until the teleport goes through.

Teleports hit their last major snag in their use as the only way to defeat enemies. Little space ships fly back and forth in set areas in stages, an instant kill if touched but they in turn are instantly killed if you teleport into them. Without the marker to help, you now have a moving target that is deadly to the touch if you’re slightly off, and while sometimes you can just jump over and ignore these baddies, other times the game will expect you to time a teleport right to avoid being instantly obliterated. Moving platforms are also a factor here, as you might have to move from one piece of floating ground to another in a small time window to avoid falling to your doom, but while your teleporting is a bit imprecise, when the game starts asking for you to teleport quickly, it does start getting more interesting. All stages are made up of one simple type of platform, although some will fall a few seconds after you stand on them, and to make the platforming a bit challenging, saws are placed around to serve as deadly hazards… or at least  the game calls them saws. The Steam store page refers to them as fidget spinners, but whatever they are, the moment you touch one, you are cut into a bunch of green slabs of meat in a manner more comical than gruesome. Revival can be a little awkward since you cannot move immediately if you’re holding down the direction you were moving from before you died. That is just a little hiccup in coding, but it does seem like Aliens Don’t Exist has quite a few coding hiccups.

One of the games moments of unusual coding comes in the final level of the game. The goal of each stage is to go from the entrance to the black exit door without dying. Early levels in the game are incredibly basic to teach you how to play, but there are only 30 levels total, so very quickly you’ll find you’re nearing the end before you’ve really had time to play levels designed more to challenge than teach. Thankfully, in the twenties, the levels do actually begin to increase in quality, asking for smarter and quicker movement… and then it abruptly ends. After finally beginning to build itself up some, the final door of level 30 stands before you, and if you go up to it… you don’t go through it. Aliens Don’t Exist doesn’t have a proper ending, you hit that last door and you’re still actually in level 30. If not for the Steam achievement that popped up notifying me that I had indeed finished the level, I would have thought it a glitch, but it just seems to be an odd bit of programming where it doesn’t even boot you to the main menu or to a credit roll. You can go and replay levels from the level select, but there is no optional content or hidden items along your journey to make it worth your while. It’s all about the platforming and teleporting, and that doesn’t find its energy until it’s getting ready to wrap up and end.

THE VERDICT: Aliens Don’t Exist falls short in a few ways, many of these seemingly tied to how the game is constructed. The jumping works fine, but the teleportation that gives this platformer its identity isn’t as responsive or as clear as a central mechanic needs to be. Even when you get a feel for it, its range and the odd hiccups in its use make it not as precise as you’d hope for in something that you’ll be using repeatedly throughout. The better levels rely on this mechanic, and the game’s length means you don’t spend much time with these stages that present a decent challenge. Since the game chose to be all about the gameplay, all you really have is the small amount on offer, and it’s sadly not quite up to snuff when it comes to making the short experience consistently enjoyable.

And so, I give Aliens Don’t Exist for PC…

A BAD rating. The teleportation can be learned and even its distance gauged accurately enough that you won’t be constantly fighting with it throughout Aliens Don’t Exist, but its issues do crop up pretty consistently still, just minor annoyances that keep you from enjoying the levels that do actually begin to push the player to navigate around them well. Too much time is spent encountering little teleportation snags in a game that isn’t really big enough to offer anything to counterbalance them.

Quick revival and small stages means that you can recover from teleportation flubs, but the game is mostly too simple and has so few components that it had to do well with all of them to be good. When there’s not much to do in a game, it’s easy for the small things to stand out even more, and the incredibly minimal design means that you spend most your time encountering the tiny road bumps that keep you from enjoying Aliens Don’t Exist. While I may be disappointed that the game’s strange name has no bearing on the game’s content, I’m more disappointed that the decent teleportation mechanic’s small hitches prevent the game from being a decent albeit short space platformer.