Once stranded on Lethe, however, the stories you create more than compensate for the narrative shortcomings. Each mission of the linear-ish campaign sees you dispatch a four-person team of marines to locations around Lethe, either to Dark And Darker Gold improve your situation or investigate why the moon is overrun with bugs. The first of these takes you to a facsimile of Hadley's Hope named Dead Hills, a sprawling shake 'n' bake colony with numerous buildings laid out on multiple floors. There's a bar, an armoury, a clinic, a command centre, and underneath it all, a twisting warren of mining tunnels.

Unlike most tactics games, you control the entire squad simultaneously, moving them around with the right-mouse button and interacting with environments using the left. It seems odd at first, but makes sense once you realise just how vulnerable your marines are when isolated. As you skulk around the mission, exploring buildings and highlighting interactable items with your shoulder-lamp, your motion-tracker in the bottom-right of the screen tracks any movement in a 60-metre radius. Whenever possible, you want to avoid the skittering white dots it highlights, not just because xenomorphs are an intensely bad hang, but because whenever you encounter them, it'll be worse than last time.

When a xenomorph spots you, the hive is stirred and they go into hunt mode, homing in on your location. Your squad will automatically shoot to keep the creatures at bay, but that alone is rarely enough to stop them. Hitting spacebar opens up a more elaborate skill menu. Suppressive fire will slow encroaching aliens in a wide cone, while grenades and shotgun blasts are useful for eliminating specific threats. But using these skills costs Command Points, and by default you only have a pool of three. They regenerate automatically, but the rate is slow.

Hence, Dark Descent's tactical fundamentals involve deploying these abilities effectively, knowing when to stick and when to twist. Yet no matter how well you fend off the xenomorphs, there will be lingering consequences to cheap Darker Gold the fight. Every attack increases alien aggressiveness, represented by a creeping ticker in the top right of the screen. When this shifts up a gear, not only will more aliens prowl the mission area, they'll also send a massive horde in your direction.

But these attacks also increase your squad's stress levels, making them shoot more wildly and consume more ammo. They can reduce stress by popping Naproleve pills, or welding the doors of a room shut for a quick rest. But both consume vital resources.

All this combines to create a thrilling rollercoaster of tension, where a single xeno wandering into a room can spiral into an intense, protracted battle that could leave your marines terrified, maimed, abducted, or plain old dead. And all of this is before you think about completing your objectives, which are often as multilayered and uncompromising as your battles with the xenomorphs. In Dead Hills, for example, you'll need to locate the command centre, and use it to locate a half-dozen missing colonists, escorting each one from wherever they're hiding to your ARC. It's vast, relentless, and exhausting, to the point where you probably won't finish it in one sitting. Indeed, a key element of Dark Descent is knowing when to pull the plug on a mission, and retreat to the Otago to lick your wounds and send back a fresh squad the next day.

When you return to the Otago, Dark Descent becomes more of an XCOM clone, using a basic facsimile of that game's strategy layer to manage your marines. Here you can treat their wounds (both physical and mental), promote them to unlock new skills, furnish them with better weapons unlocked with resources gathered during missions, and research new technologies using xenomorph samples. It's light compared to XCOM's strategy layer, and much more derivative than the way missions play out. But it serves an important purpose. Most crucially, each passing day increases the infestation level of Lethe, so every time you give your marines a break from a mission, you risk it becoming more dangerous when they return.