If you want to see a friend's true character completely clearly, never take them drinking—just take them through one game of Nemesis.
On the surface, this is a hardcore sci-fi survival game about a bunch of spaceship crew members fighting aliens and living and dying together inside a claustrophobic ship. But once you've played a single round, you'll understand: the adult aliens and facehuggers roaming the ship aren't scary at all. What really gives you nightmares at night is this bunch of plastic teammates sitting next to you.
Because the game's most essential and most twisted design is the "secret personal objective" each player draws at the start. When everyone crawls out of the cryo chambers, they're all swearing up and down: "Don't panic, brothers, I'm the mechanic, I'll go fix the engines; you're the pilot, you go adjust the course, and we'll all make it back to Earth alive together!" The whole table is harmonious and joyful, like a model advanced collective of mutual help.
Then in the mid-to-late game, fires start breaking out all over the ship, and the ventilation ducts are full of the harsh noise of aliens crawling everywhere. The most classic backstab scene appears: You're badly wounded, out of bullets, dragging a two-meter-plus adult alien behind you, limping to the escape pod door. The scout teammate sitting inside, who was just shouting over voice chat "waiting for you to get on," takes one look at the alien in the corridor, expressionlessly extends a finger, and in front of your face presses the close button. Psssh—! The airtight door locks shut tight! The escape pod detaches from the mothership and screams away, leaving you in the dark corridor staring at the alien. When the game ends and you flip over his objective card, there it is in big letters: "Player 2 (that is, you) must die"! At that moment, your blood pressure can shoot straight through the ceiling.
Sometimes everyone's objective is even "return to Earth safely," but because no one dares trust what anyone says about how many of the ship's three engines are actually broken or whether the ship's course is really pointed at Earth. Everyone sneaks into the control room to secretly check the course, and after looking, still lies with a sincere face: "No problem, it's solid, these are definitely the coordinates back to Earth!"
So don't be fooled by that pile of beautifully detailed alien miniatures. This game's real killing move is that cinematic suffocating tension that stretches "human suspicion, hypocritical cooperation, and extreme backstabbing" to the absolute limit. Until the hatch opens at the very last moment, you never know whether the person next to you is a lifesaving straw or a murderous demon.
When you play Nemesis, what was the most desperate "betrayed by a teammate" scene you've ever experienced?
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