The Haunted Hoard: Greyhill Incident (PS5)

With how common flying saucers and grey aliens with big eyes are as shorthand for aliens, it’s easy to forget that not only did people once believe aliens really did look like that, but they were terrified by them. Abductions and probings by beings you cannot understand is a scary concept even if you’ve become inured to the perpetrator’s appearance. Greyhill Incident is a stealth horror game that plays its Greys and UFOs completely straight and depicts them faithfully and without alteration, and it turns out, if you present them as serious dangers, they can be rather terrifying to face.

 

Greyhill Incident takes place in a small rural community which is left to deal with invading extra-terrestrials on their own, this first-person survival horror game even handily covering why it’s only a few farmers going up against an alien threat. Already the people of Greyhill believed they were under attack by aliens and have been dismissed by the police and the government for their paranoia, or possibly because there are actually deeper elements at work. The conspiracy-leaning mindset is embraced by this community, but everything they believe about aliens, from tinfoil protecting your mind from them to them being to blame for cattle mutilations in the area, turns out to actually be true. You find yourself playing as Ryan Baker, a father who finds his son Henry abducted early on during the night where the aliens truly come out in force. You quickly become the main force for helping others who are trying to survive the situation, all while hoping to find a way to somehow recover your son before it’s too late to save him.

Greyhill Incident uses a dark foggy night well to help construct its horror. When the first flying saucer touches down, it’s appropriately ethereal and the low lighting makes it feel unnerving despite it being an image that has otherwise been weakened by years of pop culture dismissal of such a “silly” sight. The grey aliens aren’t abnormal in their design or adjusted to be scary either, but their presentation is what makes them effective. As they patrol during their invasion they utilize classic looking ray guns to seemingly scan the environment, the player often find they need to sneak around to avoid their attention. If they do spot you, the aliens walk hastily towards you, faces unchanging as they try to get in close and strangle you. Their walk is rigid and could look like casual speed-walking if done by a human, but here they are trying to seize you and your means of fighting back are fairly limited. You can break free of a chokehold if you mash the R2 button quickly enough, but if other aliens are nearby and closed in during the scuffle, you are likely doomed. If you are grabbed too many times in a short period you won’t be able to free yourself, making them a potent a threat with at least some wiggle room if they do catch you by surprise.

 

There are ways to overcome the aliens on a small scale though. Running is a fairly valid option if managed correctly, and there are areas like cabinets, trash cans, and outhouses you can hide in to lose their attention as long as they don’t see you. Aliens do unfortunately have a rather large range of vision so shaking them can feel like a fool’s game if there’s not a lot of corners to take, but you can technically fight back. You have a baseball bat but swinging it is an oddly slow and usually ineffective tactic. It takes three good hits to knock out a grey, and it’s only temporary to boot. The bat only harms them during a certain part of a slightly delayed swing as well, making lining up three hits hard even if you’re not under pressure. You do acquire a revolver, but you won’t find much ammo for it. You might just find a single bullet in a house you aren’t even meant to be in as your refill for a short stretch of time, and even then it takes two shots to kill a grey while the sound of firing will draw nearby aliens towards you.

The difficulty in avoiding or eliminating the aliens alongside the respectful presentation works to make the aliens a potent, believable threat you will be afraid to encounter, but it comes with a price. The areas you need to avoid aliens in are often poorly designed for that task, including moments where an ambush is all but guaranteed or you’ll need to run great stretches to find a space where you can actually shake off their attention. Certain stretches of the game will have you need to grab rolls of aluminum foil or sneak past a stretch of neighborhood houses and dying during them resets all your progress, and your run stamina can be depleted if overused so you can’t just try to outpace the aliens either. Sometimes when you find an alien all you can really do is wait as they amble around, there not much in the way of distractions or special ways to sneak by. Areas without aliens aren’t much better, usually because the game enjoys including wide open spaces with little clue on where to go. Walking around an enormous cornfield hoping you’ll hit the arbitrary spots to trigger some voice lines so you can progress can be made frustrating by poor luck or needing to repeat it since you’ll encounter trouble before you can acquire a new checkpoint.

 

Even just trying to parse whose home you’re meant to head to next can be difficult since the instructions are vague, the neighborhood oppressively dark, and worst of all, characters have a very bad habit of talking over each other. If not for the subtitles, sometimes key information would be lost as people overlap not as if it was a real conversation, but purely because their voice lines are starting at the wrong time. Worst of all, that sloppily told plot, after actually making the alien cliches feel like reasonable threats, putters out as it fails to follow through on what could have been a memorable climax. The game instead shoves you into a confusing final cutscene that is likely meant to leave some questions unanswered to play into the mysterious nature of the invaders from space, but after demystifying so much of their nature, getting shy about it at the end can only feel disappointing.

THE VERDICT: Greyhill Incident can make classic alien tropes terrifying again thanks to a good mix of presentation and peril, but it also achieves some of that fear by making evading capture by extraterrestrials terribly annoying. The stealth is tedious when it doesn’t feel outright unfair, the areas you explore are sometimes too big for their own good without coming with the benefit of shaking your pursuers with ease, and the story that presents things so well at first is marred down by poorly voiced characters and a reticence to follow through on the ideas it presents.

 

And so, I give Greyhill Incident for PlayStation 5…

A TERRIBLE rating. Greyhill Incident nearly sold its tone and premise, because even with limited technical skill and the voiced scenes not always coming out cleanly, you almost can get into the mindset of these poor rural citizens under alien attack. You do feel frightened when you go around a corner and see those unfathomable extraterrestrials because there is a mortal fear in you, although it is unfortunately earned by the fact that an actual encounter with them will almost always go awry in some bothersome or unintentional manner. Aliens can be too effective while your recourse for them is far too weak or unreliable, it too easy to get trapped in a situation you don’t have much hope can force repetition of the game’s worst moments like the foil hunt or the corn field bumbling. Some more tricks you can utilize to gain an edge or aliens that aren’t quite so observant could help smooth things out some, the aliens being threatening a good thing but they aren’t implemented in a way that makes it the kind of terror a horror game wants to inspire. A lot of other problems just come from outright failed ideas or technical failings. You’re given a flashlight but it too easily alerts aliens near and far when used and you need to crouch when aliens are near to have a hope of not being heard since even normal walking is too much to avoid attention. If there were lures or things like temporary traps it could make outwitting an alien an interesting test rather than a mad dash to find something you can actually hide in without being strangled, but instead Greyhill Incident brute forces the fear by making you want to proceed mostly to put the latest annoyance behind you.

 

Trying to restore the horror of classic alien abduction stories is an enticing idea for a video game narrative and Greyhill Incident doesn’t totally fail in doing that. So much of what works requires ignoring the context that lead up to that moment, from the bad voiced scenes to the annoying stealth sections to huge areas with no clear direction, Greyhill Incident really doesn’t make a good argument for sticking with it even for the few hours it takes to beat it. The names Aaron and Alwin Roller are fairly common in the credits, and while there are many bought assets at play here rather than hand-crafted ones, it does feel possible this pair could do well if they focused on their creative strengths rather than trying to make so much of the game themselves. As the saying goes, I Want To Believe, and in this case, I want to believe in a game that can make the classic grey aliens terrifying, but the cost to make that happen here was too high, meaning that terror is wasted on a game you won’t enjoy slogging through.