Video Game / Scurge: Hive

"You can't escape the invasion from within."

Scurge: Hive is a 2006 action RPG/platform game developed by Orbital Media, published by SouthPeak Interactive, and released simultaneously for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. The premise is quite similar some of to the 2D iterations of the Metroid series, especially Metroid Fusion, but unlike them uses Isometric Projection.

The player takes on the role of Bounty Hunter Jenosa Arma, on assignment from the Confederation. Her mission is to seek out the high security Confederation Research Lab 56, on planet Inos. 48 hours prior to the start of the game, the base sent out a distress signal. No further contact could be established. Now here's the kicker: the base was designed for the containment and research of a potent infectious life form called the Scurge.

The Confeds are reasonably sure that the Scurge has escaped containment and likely infected or killed everyone on base. Therefore, it is stated in the game's introduction/Jenosa's briefing that her mission is one of data retrieval. They've outfitted her with one of the infection-resistant suits used at the base and special energy-projectile gauntlets, as apparently ordinary firearms could be infected by the Scurge.

Jenosa arrives in orbit around the planet only to be blasted by a ground-to-orbit energy cannon, which somehow transfers the infection onto her ship. After the game's first boss fight, her ship's AI, Magellan, informs her that she herself is infected. A new meter appears on your HUD, indicating the level of infection present in Jenosa's body, thus setting up a time limit for the game. Her infection level increases as you play, and if it reaches 100%, will quickly tick away her health. If Jenosa dies in this manner, she transforms into a Scurge host. However, the infection meter is easily reset by visiting a save point.

Jenosa flees her ship in an Escape Pod to Inos' surface. What follows is a fun little isometric action-adventure as Jenosa attempts to accomplish her mission and save herself from the Scurge infection.

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Scurge: Hive provides examples of the following tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: In addition to your standard energy blast, Jenosa's gauntlets can be upgraded to project fireballs, electromagnetic pulses, and "dissipator" blasts.
• Action Girl: Jenosa is a determined female hero in the vein of a certain other platforming bounty hunter.
• After Boss Recovery: Upon defeating a boss, you are rewarded with a large purple blob that confers fully restored health and a generous portion of experience. Subverted by the Final Boss, who takes advantage of Jenosa absorbing its biomatter to trigger a Battle in the Center of the Mind.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: For completing the game on Normal difficulty, you are rewarded with the ability to choose from a variety of recolors for Jenosa.
• Apocalyptic Log: The first few messages you find are about business as usual at the base, frequently mentioning an upgrade you will soon acquire. However, you soon come across logs made by scientists and security personnel hiding out from the Scurge, in increasing states of fear and despair. One log was left by a man who says that his infection containment system in his suit has failed. He says he will try to use his remaining hours of consciousness to delay the Scurge's escape from Inos.
• Arm Cannon: Two blasters are built into Jenosa's gauntlets, though she only ever appears to fire one of them.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The three weapons that deal additional damage to one type of enemy are very useful (especially since killing enemies with a weakness spreads damage to nearby enemies), but they also increase the strength of an enemy of an opposing type when hit. This can make these weapons very impractical in rooms where you have several different enemy types attacking you at once.
• Badass Normal: Sure, she's clearly meant to be an Expy of Samus Aran, but unlike Samus who was infused with Chozo DNA and the like, Jenosa is just a regular human who's damn good at her job
• Barrier Change Boss: The next-to-last boss, Cerberus, will periodically switch between the three main types of enemy (biologic, mechanical, energy-based), gaining the corresponding weakness and resistance in the process. While the change is visually distinctive, it's complicated by a Doppelgänger Spin (and if you deal with the copies, you'll be faced with several enemies that are empowered by the boss's weakness).
• Body Horror: Once the Scurge infection takes control, you lose all cognitive ability and become a mutated slave to The Source. The Source has also assimilated several humans into its central body, complete with faces sticking out of parts of it.
• Boring, but Practical: The basic shot Jenosa starts with. It deals pretty low damage compared to the other weapons, but it is of neutral alignment and can't strengthen an enemy of an opposing type, which can be important when the game makes a habit of tossing a bunch of enemies of different types at you, if not all three at once. It also fires at the same speed as the other weapons and gets stronger as you gain levels.
• Boss Arena Recovery: A few bosses spawn lesser enemies you can kill for health.
• Boss Rush: Beating the game on Hard Mode unlocks a boss rush mode. During a rush, your stats and weapons are fixed for each fight.
• Broken Bridge: Many areas are inaccessible to the player until after Jenosa acquires a given upgrade.
• Building Swing: Well, cliff swinging, really, and it's not so much a "swing" as a "bungee-propelled jump". Jenosa's magnetic tether receives a grappler upgrade, allowing her to use specific grapple points to slingshot across longer gaps.
• Bullet Time: Courtesy of the Adrenaline Booster upgrade. Used to negotiate areas with falling rocks and to complete some of the timed challenges.
• Camera Abuse: Killing biological enemies will briefly splatter the screen with fluids.
• Character Level: Jenosa gains experience by picking up green globules of biomatter left behind by defeated foes. Leveling up confers a higher maximum HP and increased damage from her projectiles.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: Somewhat. There are a handful of scenery sets made up of predefined components, and every area has the same doors. The assortment is small enough to appear somewhat samey, but not enough to annoy the average player.
• Critical Annoyance: Two different types. One is the standard low-life beep when Jenosa's health runs low, the other is a heartbeat sound that begins at 60% infection, then gets much faster at 90%. Quick, get to a Save Point!
• Determinator: Jenosa isn't about to let a little thing like a mind-eating virus stop her.
  • This is actually emphasized with the contamination meter rising quicker as the game goes on, either as an implied result of the contamination growing that much more aggressive or Jenosa herself weakening to it and thus succumbing faster, or some combination of both. Yet despite the infection growing all the more lethal to her, Jenosa presses on regardless...not that she has a choice otherwise.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Jenosa can't move while firing.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Subversion: The Source's final form summons up to three duplicates to attack you, but these duplicates are of Jenosa rather then the boss. It is vital you destroy these duplicates quickly; if all three are left around long enough, The Source can use its most powerful attack and drain a significant portion of your health.
• Double Jump: It's possible to double-jump with the aid of an upgrade.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Portions of the Research Facility are underground. The entire base is mazelike, and the underground areas are no exception.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Source seems to increase in intelligence and maleficence as it absorbs everything around it. Allowing this thing to escape Inos would not be a good idea.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Not the standard fire/lightning/ice arrangement so much as combustion/EMP/"dissipation". The mechanic is identical, however — each type of enemy (biological, mechanical, or energy-based) is weak to one weapon, is strengthened and sped up by another, and takes damage equal to the basic shot from the third.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The title. The game deals with a Hive made of the titular organism.
• Fiery Redhead: One of Action Girl Jenosa's palette swaps gives her auburn hair, and several more feature red hair.
• Final-Exam Boss: It's not the final boss, but the second-to-last boss requires you to constantly change beams to keep dealing maximum damage to him.
• Foreshadowing: When you complete the Ransol Industrial Facility and turn the power back on, Magellan tells Jenosa that it has to be activated and deactivated manually, which Jenosa concludes must mean someone intentionally shut off power to the station. You later learn this was done to prevent The Source from escaping the planet.
• Freeze Ray: It's less of a ray then an area-of-effect attack, but the Cryostasis module will temporarily freeze nearby enemies. It's a purely defensive measure, as the frozen enemies become impervious to attack. They can be dragged onto pressure plates to activate devices in the environment, however.
• From a Single Cell: A single cell is all it takes for the Scurge to become a problem.
• Fungus Humongous: The Scurge infests whole areas of walls and ground throughout the base. Touching this red Creep-like substance slows you down and causes your infection meter to increase far more rapidly.
• Ghost Planet: Not once does Jenosa ever encounter a researcher face-to-face. Well, uninfected, at any rate.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The magnetic tether, the first upgrade in the game. It's used to drag blocks and frozen enemies onto pressure plates, and eventually to sling across gaps once you acquire the grapple upgrade.
• Harder Than Hard: Did you think Hard mode was challenging? Try Insane. Completing it (if you complete it) unlocks Ultra Mode, which serves as a form of New Game Plus instead (see below).
• HP to One: The strongest attack of the Battle in the Center of the Mind phase of the Final Boss is a variant. It drains a large portion of Jenosa's health, but can't actually reduce her below 1 HP — of course, once she's at that point, getting brushed by any of the boss's other attacks is a Game Over.
• Hub Level: Biocore, the main research facility, has transporters that connect to all the other areas of the game. The inactive nexus in the center of the facility also leads to the final boss.
• The Immune: Downplayed. Jenosa is infected by the first boss, and while Decontamination Platforms can reset the progress of the Scurge infection, they can't cure it. Your viral mass increases by about 1% every two seconds; letting hit 100% imposes gradual HP drain.
• Isometric Projection: The game is viewed from an isometric perspective. Looks cool, but can make platforming a pain due to the lack of perspective shifting.
• It Can Think: Professor Derad comments that originally, the Scurge didn't seem to exhibit any kind of sentient thought, but during his discussions with Jenosa, she points out that it seems to understand what it's doing as it's trying to escape Inos. He remarks that the creatures began to develop a collective mind as a result of absorbing other intelligent life, leading to it planning its escape.
• Kill It with Fire: Possible, once the Combustion upgrade is in your possession. Lethal against biological enemies, but only makes mechanical enemies stronger.
• Late to the Tragedy: Jenosa arrives after communication was lost and the Scurge infected most of the base. Notably, this was expected by the Confederation who assigned this mission to her, who rightly assumed the base losing contact was because of the failure to contain the Scurge.
• Latex Space Suit: Jenosa's suit is rather form-fitting.
• Male Gaze: Every cinematic shot of Jenosa emphasizes the junk in her trunk. Even her sprite emphasizes it.
• Meat Moss: Patches of Scurge biomatter litter the base, often filling pits or covering most of the floor aside from small gaps in the biomatter. When Jenosa stands on the patches, her infection rate rapidly increases, and her speed is greatly reduced.
• New Game Plus: Downplayed with Ultra Mode. Though you do get to have max level stats and the 11th-Hour Superpower from the Final Boss fight, you still have to collect the weapons again.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Jenosa is on the receiving end of this attitude from Professor Derad when she reveals she has been restoring the nodes to the Yggdrasil Nexus in the Biocore facility. Justified in that she had no way of knowing this could allow the Scurge to escape Inos, but also ultimately subverted, as she uses it to get to The Source, destroy it, and then leave the planet herself.
• Nintendo Hard: Scurge is a very tough game, and for a handful of reasons:
  • Enemies can be pretty tough, but for the most part the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors means they aren't TOO difficult to handle... until the game starts throwing multiple types at you at once, such as throwing biological enemies in addition to machines, who will gain increased attack strength from the Combustion projectiles that the biologicals are weak to. This amounts to you either having to run around like a maniac, trying to be perfect in your shots, or use the weaker-but-neutral basic shot in order to kill everything.
  • The isometric perspective makes it very difficult to determine where you are in relation to other elevations on the current screen. This can make the more difficult platforming later on rather obnoxious, as the angles make it easy to misjudge distances and fall.
  • The infection meter, which rises by 1% every few seconds, and starts getting significantly faster over the course of the game. This makes the entire game one long Timed Mission, giving you a small handful of minutes before you face your HP plummeting like crazy and leading to a gruesome death if you can't find a decontamination platform in time. Granted, the platforms aren't too spread out, and so long as you stay on the move, aren't in the habit of pointlessly wandering/wasting time, and avoid wading around in the Scurge goop, you don't have to worry too much about your infection. However, it can make boss battles pretty hectic, as you only have a very short amount of time to learn the boss's patterns and then kill it.
• Notice This: Whenever you're in a room that contains a keycard, you'll get a periodic "ping" sound accompanied by a HUD icon animation.
• One-Man Army: Jenosa is one tough cookie. She didn't have a full idea of what she was getting into, but that doesn't slow her down much.
• Palette Swap: Many enemies have stronger versions of different colors. Jenosa herself unlocks different palettes after completing the game once.
• Power Crystal: Lensman-like hand crystals on both of Jenosa's gauntlets serve as the emitters for her beam weapons.
• Powered Armor: Jenosa's suit is a combination of a suit of armor with weapons (letting her survive the Scurge infestation) and a Latex Space Suit (letting her show off her assets).
• Save Point: Referred to as sick bays or decontamination platforms on the map and by Magellan, respectively, they are triply vital. In addition to saving your game, they refill your health and reset your infection meter, and they are the first things to be marked on your map upon entering a new area.
• Sequel Hook: Jenosa escapes the planet at the end of the game, but her whereabouts are unknown and the credits end on a "To be continued..." Unfortunately, the studio that made the game fell apart, so a sequel is unlikely.
• Sole Survivor: In the end, only Jenosa remains.
• Status Effects: Jenosa can be poisoned by several biological-type enemies, which turns her a pulsating green but only deals trivial damage.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: Jenosa's gauntlets. They can also fire grenades in addition to the aforementioned beams and freeze blast. (Where do these grenades come from? Same place as Samus Aran's missiles, one might venture.)
• Theme Naming: Most of the bosses are named after Greek and Norse mythical beasts (or associated plants, in the case of the Mandragora).
• Timed Mission:
  • The whole game minus the ship introduction and first boss fight (as well as the very last phase of the final boss), due to your infection meter. You only have a couple minutes of running around between save rooms before your infection hits 100% and starts actively killing you.
  • The timed shoot-the-targets challenges you must complete to obtain the upgrades are a more immediate variant — once you shoot one pylon, you have to tag the rest before time runs out or else start over.
• The Virus: The eponymous Scurge, capable of infecting and taking control of not only organic lifeforms, but robots and energy-based beings as well. It's controlled by a Hive Mind and is capable of learning.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Professor Derad chews Jenosa out when she reveals she's been slowly reactivating the Yggdrasil Transport Nexus in the Biocore, claiming that The Source is planning to use it to escape Inos. Justified somewhat on Jenosa's behalf as she had no way of knowing this, and it's also her only way off the planet.
• You Are Too Late: Magellan picks up the transmissions of Professor Dorrel, but after facing Jormungand, she only finds his body. Right after, she communicates several times with Professor Derad before the transmission is cut off when he's attacked and absorbed into The Source. Both times, Jenosa laments on always being too late to save anyone.

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