One particular area of nostalgia that hasn’t been mercilessly mined by video games is pulpy, B-movie science fiction. Anyone with a hankering for some dumb sci-fi fun will be happy to know that Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space is now available for consoles as well as PC.

Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space is a first-person adventure game in which a hapless night-watchman is confronted by with an invasion of eye-ball aliens with tentacles. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, despite the relative uniqueness of its setting and subject matter (for video games), Albedo wastes the opportunity to tell a fun story by basically telling no story at all, favouring its dodgy mechanics over narrative.

In an attempt to clash genres together, Albedo is part puzzle game/part first-person combat. The puzzles are simple enough that the player can solve them without too much trouble, which is a massive plus, but they are constantly hampered by the games’ shoddy design.

The puzzles are inventory-based, requiring the player to collect items around the environment in order to remove obstacles preventing progression to the next area. Maybe the controls are simply not suited to consoles, but I found it constantly frustrating having to navigate through the inventory, pulling the wrong item out or picking things off the floor by accident without realising it.

Nothing about Albedo feels smooth or intuitive. While the graphics suit the pulpy sci-fi mood of the game, walking around the environments and interacting with objects feels awkward. There was one point where I had to re-load because I couldn’t take some blueprints from a file because the file had fallen onto the floor face-down, and every time I picked it up the game only gave me the option to close the file and not rotate it.

Talking of re-loading, I had to play through the opening three rooms a grand total of THREE times. That’s a chunk of my life I’ll never get back. The first time I had to replay was because I foolishly throught the ‘menu’ button in the pause-menu might give me the option to fiddle with the brightness levels, but instead launched me back to the start-menu without warning or option to save.

The second time I had to replay was because after solving a neat little puzzle involving a fire-extinguisher and an elevator key, the game simply would not recognise the fact that the key existed, meaning I couldn’t pick it up from the floor. I trawled the internet for solutions, finding that it was a glitch and not some meta-puzzle that was going over my head.

After a game-breaking bug, it’s hard to put your confidence back into a game. Whenever I found myself slightly baffled by a puzzle, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “is this a glitch or am I missing something?”

It’s a shame that the game is so poorly put together, because otherwise there’s a lot of fun to be had. As well as the intelligent puzzle design, the gameplay is broken up by little minigames which are satisfying to solve and short enough that they don’t overstay their welcome.

Unfortunately, the combat in Albedo is frankly atrocious. For the early sections of the game, when faced with an enemy all the player can do is button mash whilst an alien bobs up and down on screen gradually draining health. It does pick up a little when guns come into the equation, but it’s an unnecessary and ill-thought out addition to a puzzle game.

To top it all off, the voice-acting might be the worst I’ve ever heard in a video game. The protagonist responds to hideous and deadly aliens in the same tone of voice that a perturbed middle-aged man might use if he took a sip of his tea only to discover that he forgot to put sugar in it. Albedo also commits the cardinal sin of voice-acting in adventure games by giving the player the ability to ‘observe’ objects like a lamp, only for the voice-actor to say ‘it’s a lamp’.

If the developers had disposed of combat and spent more time refining the gameplay, hiring decent voice actors and developing the story, Albedo might have been an interesting little oddity.

However, Albedo: Eyes From Outer Space can only be considered to be the worst kind of disappointment. There’s a great game and an interesting idea in there somewhere, but it’s smothered by frustrating and erratic design.

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