It seems that we simply can’t get enough of the Xenomorph from the popular Aliens movie franchise. The nightmarish parasitic creature, with acid for blood and vaguely phallic shape has terrified movie audiences for decades and with the recent burst of (not terribly good) movies, it’s inevitable that we’d get lots of big books filled with pictures of monsters to entertain fans.
The Alien: Augmented Reality Survival Manual is written in an in-universe style, intending to double as a guidebook to the horrors of the Alien universe should you suddenly find yourself in Ridley Scott’s nightmare world. It stitches together the various films to form something of a complete world, something the movies barely do.
This is essentially a sourcebook. It’s crammed with information and facts about a made up world so you can wow your friends and ‘well actually’ strangers on social media. It’s perfect for fans of that world, especially if they’re likely to write Alien fanfiction or just really, really like the world. It’s also crammed with photos from the movies. The content mostly concentrates on the more recent features; Prometheus and Covenant, but there’s plenty here for fans of the better movies as well.
The book’s unique selling point is a modern novelty. If you download the book’s own app onto your smartphone, you can use special pages in the book to trigger some mini-games. These pages appear in the middle of the book and they’re produced in the style of ‘restricted documents’. Wave your specially prepared phone near these pages and you’ll trigger a quirky event of some sort. The phone super-imposes a ‘3D’ image on the book. This lets you examine a computer generated alien egg or control a drop-ship, and so on. This is a bit of waste; the book does fine without these features and the mini-games amuse for a few minutes and nothing more. It’s just about worth the effort but it neither adds nor detracts from the book itself.
Great for fans who don’t already have it all.
ALIEN: AUGMENTED REALITY SURVIVAL MANUAL / AUTHOR: OWEN WILLIAMS / PUBLISHER: CARLTON BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
