Neat little game, very early in development. Currently it's more or less just a proof-of-concept experience about jumping between hosts trying to uncover your origin story, which isn't at all what I'd hoped for based on the steam page. There's no longevity to a playthrough and it's all very low-stakes. It's basically a race against time to uncover the whole story before you become so weak as to be incapable of continuing. That's the TL;DR, so here's something a bit more in-depth:
You start out on a random stretch of street near to a dog. You attach yourself to this dog and take it over. Unfortunately, it's a dog, that's not very useful, so you use the dog's big doggy vision radius to spot a more intelligent looking human, who you promptly waddle on over to a glob onto. Now with this human's more capable body as a host you can evolve. You unlock the brain probe which lets you siphon off the human's knowledge into your own pool for use in other hosts, its knowledge of shopping(?), smoking, other facets of human society as well as other more useful concepts like its knowledge of how firearms work. Very cool! You also gain the ability to modify the hosts body as you yourself evolve, spending time and energy to camouflage your presence or - oh, nevermind, the host is dead.
Hosts inevitably die in this game, which is pretty much my biggest gripe with it, the second biggest gripe coming up soon, by the way. So you spend all this time unlocking evolutions and such, putting them onto hosts, only for the effort expended on this upgrade to kill them anyway after literally just two minutes of walking around.
How does the game combat this?
Habitats! You can unlock the ability to create habitats which are your own sewer-based little base areas you build up to act as your safe base of operations. Very cool! So you make one, and go down there, evolve the ability to create biocrystals that recharge your energy. You pop one down and OPE, that consumed your host, they're dead. No problem, at least I have the crystal now, so I go back to the surface, smooch another hairless ape and get back to the habitat to recharge but - nuts - the crystals only recharge *assimilated* hosts so you'll need an assimilation pod. Fair enough, let's get me that xenomorphic goodness. You evolve the ability to make the pod, and bam, another dead host later you're back with a fresh one ready to assimilate it - and you do! Your energy is no longer dropping, in fact it's going back up, Cool, a permanent host, nice! You evolve all the trimmings, camouflage, paralysis spit, dopamine controlling mechanisms and after all that, you're feeling great. You can rest and recuperate and your host no longer fights your control, parasitic life is good.
So you set about reading some notes to uncover the story when suddenly, out of nowhere, you get the message "Your habitat has been destroyed, this loss leaves a mark" or words to that effect. And indeed, a group of random SWAT dudes teleported in there while you weren't looking, this can happen while you're there by the way, and they trashed the place meaning your minimum investment of two dead hosts is gone, and your new one is now bound to share the same fate because there's no way to store a highly evolved host safely. I guess it's not so bad, right? You can just make new habitats every now and then and get yourself a new semi-permanent host each time, it's only slightly incredibly annoying.
Except, you can't, your maximum energy has been permanently reduced by 10% with the loss of that habitat with no chance of recovering it. This will continue to happen each and every time you make a habitat, there's no way to prevent losing them even if you kill every SWAT member that turns up. So that's that.
There's a neat little plot to uncover about you being a parasite attached to an alien that crash landed and something about finding your spaceship but I never got that far because I ran out of energy and given my utter lack of interest in playing against a soft-timer I didn't feel the need to try again.
So that was my experience, I'm gonna give the game a thumbs up because I think it has great potential and I don't want to hate on the game for going a direction I personally don't like, I just want people to be aware going in that it's very much a quickfire try-try-try again type game akin to a roguelike dungeon crawl and not the insidious slow-burn parasite experience I was hoping for. I'll be refunding the game because it's just not what I expected, but given more time in the oven I could see this one going either way so I'll be keeping a close eye on it. It's at a crossroads right now development-wise and I'd love to see it go further down the slow-burn infestation route.
