Space Hulk

Space Hulk is a 1993 adaptation of the Games Workshop board game of the same name, set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. You command squads of Space Marine Terminators, heavily armoured soldiers, as they push through the narrow corridors of derelict ships overrun by Genestealers, which are fast, numerous and deadly at close range.

It runs in real time and gives you two ways to play. On the Terminator view you see through the eyes of one marine at a time, with small screens showing what the others see. On the planning screen you look at a top-down map and give orders to the whole squad. A Freeze button stops the action so you can give orders, but freeze time is limited: a timer runs down while you plan, and when it runs out the clock starts again whether you are ready or not.

The rationed pause is the reason to play it. Most games that let you stop time let you stop it for as long as you like. Space Hulk makes thinking time a resource, so a hard fight is one where you run out of it. The corridors are tight, the lighting is dark, the enemy comes from every vent, and the marines are tough but few.

It is hard, and its interface is from 1993. A sequel, Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, followed in 1995. Later Space Hulk games have gone back to turns, which makes this one's real-time design rarer than it should be.

Where X-COM gave you time to think on every turn, Space Hulk sells it to you in small amounts. Both are about a small squad in a confined space against an enemy that sees in the dark better than you do. Space Hulk drops the campaign entirely and keeps only the corridor fight, which it makes tenser than almost anything else from its decade.