Video games are no stranger to alien threats. We’ve seen too many games to count where space marines land on an exoplanet and promptly start gunning down some sort of hard-charging xenomorph, or a Earth-based resistance movement fends off hordes of Martians as they defend their home planet down to the last bullet. These bombastic sci-fi games can be a lot of fun. But video games have historically overlooked another kind of alien story, one where the focus scales way down. 

They’ve often focused on the singular, square-jawed heroes who saved Earth, forgetting that in the background are millions of people just hoping to outlast whatever intergalactic war has come to their front doors. Jumpship’s Somerville took to the Xbox E3 virtual stage to show off its Limbo-esque invasion story, and in the process, made a promise twice left unfulfilled by its predecessors. I’m hopeful the third time’s the charm and we can finally get an alien story grounded in humanity.

I’ve lamented often about the lack of proper alien abduction stories in games. It’s a well-trodden subgenre in TV, movies, and books, but games haven’t really bothered to use the setting event in any meaningful way, though two unrelated games did both make such plans years ago. The first was The Hum: Abductions. This first-person narrative adventure debuted with a stunning gameplay trailer back in 2015. In it, we see a mother checking on her sleeping toddler in their bedroom before being drawn to a window as a dog barks restlessly outside and the entire mood of the house quickly descends into anxiousness. It has the feel of a home invasion movie like The Strangers — until the red glow and accompanied hum start to permeate throughout the woman’s ground floor.

Soon after, lights flicker, banging and rattling disrupt the child’s sleep from behind a suddenly locked door, and the genre seems to shift from home invasion to haunted house. Rather than ghosts, however, the ultra-bright lights and mysterious, persistent hum signal the arrival of some unseen extraterrestrial threat, who descend quickly on the home to apparently abduct the baby, only giving the mother access to the child’s room again once it’s too late. It’s a shocking scene, told without cuts or music, so even in the demo, one easily gathers a sense of place and all its intensity.

I’d never seen anything like it. Finally, an alien abduction game, I thought. That was six years ago. The game never came out, and it’s spent the last four years in total silence. Sadly, The Hum: Abductions disappeared into the night like the baby in the trailer, and there seems to be no signs of it returning.

Shortly after I discovered The Hum, To Azimuth was revealed. This was set to be a 2D game focused on a man struggling with alcoholism who goes missing and the siblings who have to find him. In his wake are left only messages to his sister where he reveals that he believed aliens are coming to abduct him and take him “to Azimuth.” 

While its reveal trailer is more of a mood piece than the vertical slice of The Hum‘s premiere, there is perhaps no trailer I’ve watched more in my life than this one for To Azimuth. 

Everything from the quivering, defeated voicework to the solemn and sad music felt like it was built exactly to my taste. It was to be an alien game with heart, deeply concerned with its characters and using the apparent alien abduction as an examination of humanity, family, loss, and other cathartic themes. Like The Hum, it’s been all but confirmed as canceled, with its last update having come five years ago and the one-person studio, Bracket Games (Three-Fourths Home) seemingly being wiped from existence on every social media platform.

You can imagine my joy when Somerville re-emerged on the Xbox stage at E3 2021, highlighting an alien threat but focusing down on just a single family, not the armed-to-the-teeth heroes that would fend them off. In the trailer, we see the family presumably just before the aliens arrive, asleep and aglow in the light of the TV on what they surely thought would be a typical night. It signals that we’ll get to know this small unit and come to care for them as they care for each other. 

At times, the trailer depicts some of the family exploring without the others, and that fills me with the right kind of dread, the kind a horror story is meant to provide. Have they been abducted? Are they even alive? They will be tested, and it doesn’t seem like the sort of game where by its end, you’re pushing out the invaders with your ragtag militia of Earthlings. No, it’s much more likely to be the case that you hardly get by at all, and probably never even pick up a gun in the game. 

Somerville, like The Hum and To Azimuth feels hopeless and imbued with humanity, which is to be expected when you know it comes from one of the co-founders of Playdead, the team behind Limbo and Inside. Dino Patti seems to have brought with him all of the same enveloping atmosphere of his past games to his new studio, Jumpship, and in the process has unknowingly promised me an engrossing game the likes of which I’ve seen disappear twice already.

Part of me still feels hesitant to get too excited, but I want to believe Xbox would not choose to have any indie games on its stage if it was not totally confident in them releasing. We can weigh its final merits as a game sometime later, but I wish I could just have the assurance that Somerville will deliver on this basic promise: just come out. Please.

In other media, stories of alien contact are always about the humans on the other end. We see that in things like Signs, Arrival, and even the more action-oriented Falling Skies, just to name a few. Despite a long list of them, never have games about aliens really put their characters ahead of their action and setpieces. They’ve always aimed to be explosive blockbusters like Halo and Resistance, or used them jokingly like Saints Row and Destroy All Humans. 

I’ve been waiting for a game to take its aliens — and more importantly, its humans — seriously for so long. Where The Hum and To Azimuth sadly vanished into the night like they were caught under a tractor beam, I find myself thrilled, albeit still a bit cautious, that Somerville might finally bring to video games a story that grapples with our place in the universe as told not by call-heeding heroes, but by ordinary humans.