The Alien franchise is getting another virtual reality .... “experience,” this time based on the upcoming Ridley Scott film Alien: Covenant.
The experience is in development by the Fox Innovation Lab and MPC VR, but doesn’t yet have a release date.
“The VR Experience for Alien: Covenant is a dread-inducing journey into the depths of the Alien universe,” according to the press release. “Viewers will discover the true meaning of terror as they navigate through horrifying alien environments and a story where every decision could mean the difference between life and death.”
This will be the second commercial VR creation from The Fox Innovation Lab at Twentieth Century Fox. It’s first was a VR experience based on the film The Martian. The Martian VR Experience dropped players into a number of moments from the film, allowing to puzzle out simple solutions or simply look around in a 360-degree virtual reality environment. The Martian VR Experience is available now for PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
It’s unclear if the Alien VR creation will be more game like or simply another VR tourist attraction.
The developers, MPC VR, created The Martian VR Experience as well as a number of other VR creations, all of which seemed to be geared toward promoting a product.
If it turns out that this is a game, and not simply a promo for the movie, it has quite a high bar to surpass in Alien: Isolation.
Isolation was one of the first mainstream uses of virtual reality in gaming when it hit in 2014. It dropped a player into a spacecraft with a xenomorph. Isolation was essentially an incredibly frightening game of hide and die.
There’s certainly plenty of grist for a game in the upcoming film. Alien: Covenant, which hits theaters on May 19, follows the crew of the ship Covenant. The crew, which is bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world.
We’ve reached out to Fox for more details about the experience including when it’s coming, what platform it’s coming to and if it has gameplay elements. We’ll update this story when they respond.
Update: The experience is due out this year and will be available “across all tethered platforms,” a spokesperson tells Polygon.