Cruel and Unusual Death: Rampant, and generally inflicted by the hadals.Cold-Blooded Torture: Humans captured by hadals are subject to an 'initiation' that essentially amounts to this, involving beatings, crude forced tattooing, and ritual mutilation.Breeding Slave: Generally what happens to women captured by the hadals.Better to Die than Be Killed: Considering that hadal captivity often leads to cannibalism and trauma-induced psychosis among humans, many characters choose to commit suicide instead.Beneath the Earth: The discovery and exploration of the sub-planet drives the plot of the novel.Deeper also finishes with the very strong implication that China and the United States have started a nuclear war. Apocalypse How: At the end, the hadals are decimated by a man-made plague.None of that changes the fact that hadal behavior towards outsiders involves hefty doses of what humans would consider slavery, rape, mutilation, torture and cannibalism. Lip service is paid to the idea that the hadals simply act out of a culture with a different set of expectations about good and evil. The novel was followed by a sequel, Deeper. Nor the 2005 British horror film The Descent written and directed by Neil Marshall, although there are certainly similarities. Has nothing to do with the video game series Descent. Eventually, these two stories intersect as the expedition comes face-to-face with Satan himself. The other about the Beowulf Club, a group of highly-determined scholars who set out to find the historical figure who inspired the legends of The Devil. The first concerns an ill-fated expedition into the sub-planet. The book is split between two storylines. Their fall from grace formed the basis of the historical belief in demons. While presently degenerate and brutal, the 'hadals' had once possessed a high level of civilization, having reached the Iron Age as far back as 20,000 years ago and mentored subsequent human civilizations. The Descent is a 1999 science-fiction/horror novel by American author Jeff Long focusing on the discovery and exploration of an extensive labyrinth of tunnels and passages stretching throughout the sub-surface of the entire world, inhabited by several species of alternately-evolved troglobitic hominids who have adapted to their underground condition. If it can manage to do the license justice while providing the tactical action we’ve already seen, Aliens: Dark Descent will be a special – and unique – take on the franchise.What if Hell was an actual place on Earth? Aliens: Dark Descent isn’t going to be easy, but it’s already gotten its hooks in me. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, and I know, that given another chance, I could do better. Spending valuable resources to weld the wrong door, using a health kit to heal stress that I should have saved, positioning my squad in the wrong place, not deploying all of my sentry turrets. I attempted it twice, but was beaten both times by choices I’d made earlier. I never managed to survive long enough to get that door open.

When you manage a fight perfectly, Dark Descent feels incredible, and when I messed up, I always knew why. Even killing an alien can be dangerous if their blood sprays onto one of your marines. Battles are tense, hectic affairs even with the ability to slow down time, thinking on your feet is crucial. Every fight has stakes you can pick up and carry any marine who’s been knocked out, but anyone who dies is gone for good. I enjoyed Dark Descent most when it was hurling xenomorphs at me and I had to manage everything at once: my squad’s position, my marines’ health and stress, what abilities I used, turrets I’d placed, and spots of fire on the ground, while challenging me to prioritize targets and manage close-range encounters. Every trip into new areas was a slow, cautious affair, with my eyes alternating between my motion tracker and my squad’s status.

Delving deeper into the facility meant spending resources, gaining stress, risking my squad, and making the hive more aware of my presence, but it could also get me resources that might help me out later.

My time with Dark Descent was filled with fraught choices. Welding a door shut would cut down the ways the xenomorphs could approach, but it meant that I’d have to break the weld if I had to retreat through that area. Managing your resources is key, and the choices you make at one point in a level can help or hinder you later. Soon, your marines’ stress will start to rise again. Welding doors costs tools you might need to fix something spending a health kit to reduce stress means you can’t use it later to heal and a reprimand is a Band-Aid, a quick fix. You can use health kits to bring it down, reprimand your squad to temporarily stop it from rising, or, if you have enough tools, weld the doors of certain rooms shut to create a sanctuary so your squad can rest.

You can handle stress in a variety of ways.

Descent space fiction