The terrain no longer maps comfortingly to the dimensions of a screen. Unless you play through the whole game from the security of your zoomed-out Sensor Manager, it's possible for in-game entities to creep up on you, “inhabit” you, passing through the back of your skull and out of your eyes without warning. In a “true” 3D RTS like Homeworld, however, the player’s perspective is situated within the world. You are focussed on what goes on there, but it doesn't exactly light up your fight-or-flight reflexes.
The world is a window, your minions the occupants of another dimension. Perhaps spurred by the demands of esports, where immediacy and readability are key, it deals in firm borders, eagle-eyed perspectives, and a corresponding detachment. Two decades since the original's release, and for all the genre's embracing of 3D models and backdrops, the RTS remains a resolutely planar affair. The case for Homeworld as a horror experience begins with the fact that, unlike the vast majority of real-time strategy games, it plays in three dimensions. They are not heroes, but they are still patriotic Hiigarans - and when they receive a distress signal from another clan, warning of a Taiidan attack, there’s only one possible course of action. Were Cataclysm a “true” sequel, Somtaaw would be NPC escort fodder, fit only to pad out a mission or two en route to a plot point. Their clan mothership, the Kuun-Lan, is not a graceful crescent moon like that of the first game, but a beat-up, bulb-nosed tanker with a giant hangar bay that suggests a paunchy house cat. They are not great scientists and warriors, but small-time asteroid miners, with a tiny fleet and an equally tiny say over Hiigaran politics. They do not have the light of destiny about them. Kiith Somtaaw, the clan in question, are not obvious protagonist material. Homeworld, it turns out, offers a surprisingly rich foundation for horror.
It's a sidestory, but like many a “B-team” spin-off (see also, Black Ops), it gets at something weird and elemental about the mainline sci-fi strategy games. Homeworld: Cataclysm, a standalone expansion created by Barking Dog Studios, puts you in charge of one of these clans.
Having wrested their birth planet, Hiigara, from the Taiidan Empire, the Kushan have re-established their old clan households and embroiled themselves in petty rivalries.
It is a fallow period for tales of galactic adventure. Over a century has passed since the Kushan discovered the secrets of interstellar travel, buried beneath the crust of a backwater world. It's Halloween! We've put the Hivemind Of Horror into a spooky jar of bubbling green liquid, and it'll be pumping horror-themed articles onto the site today.
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