What’s the point of the whole radio code broadcasting system if our safe can only be opened with the code in the manual?” Naturally, this sparked a search for said manual. It read: “The wall safe in classroom 4B keeps resetting to the default combination. Upon first encountering the safe, I breathed a heavy sigh and, disappointed that an otherwise stylish game was resorting to such a tired video game trope, began to scour the classroom, and the rooms adjacent to it, for the code’s telltale note. One of the game’s earliest hurdles is a locked safe in a classroom on the east side of the map. Something has gone awry at an underground facility, and as an android recently awoken from hibernation, it’s your job to descend into the complex, fend off feral zombies, and solve a heap of environmental puzzles from a top-down perspective.

It takes place in the outer reaches of a fictional star system, on a wintry planet not unlike the Antarctic research base of John Carpenter’s The Thing. The same can’t be said for Signalis, the throwback survival-horror game that was released a couple weeks ago on Game Pass. Look no further than the likes of Dying Light 2, The Last of Us Part 1, or Deathloop, in which computer passwords and safe combinations are scrawled on scraps of paper hidden only feet away. For all of their top-secret military bases and heavily guarded castles, the worlds of video games are still woefully reckless when it comes to security.

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