When it comes to survival horror, there are a few big names in the industry that seem to be the only ones that get the formula right. That’s why it was so impressive when Creative Assembly, better known for their strategy games, released Alien: Isolation, a superb single-player horror experience that masters the pacing and ambiance of the genre.
Filling the gap that the Dead Space series left when it ended, and continuing the story of the original film, Isolation is a game that can be appreciated by fans of the movie and by survival horror fans in general.
No One Can Hear you Scream
In Alien: Isolation, players control Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley. When her mother’s flight recorder is found and brought aboard the Sevastopol station, Amanda makes her way there, only to find the space station in chaos. Now, she has to survive the threat of an android malfunction, and even worse, survive a seemingly unkillable alien menace that lurks around every corner.
Isolation takes inspiration from the first Alien film: unlike the creatures in the sequels, Isolation’s Xenomorph is an unstoppable force of nature. Featuring an impressive AI system (based on Left 4 Dead’s Director AI,) the Xenomorph in Isolation will hunt the player relentlessly.
- Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Fifteen years after the events of Alien, Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother's disappearance.
- Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive.
- Alien: Isolation - Last Survivor. As Ellen Ripley, it is down to you to complete the last mission on board the Nostromo. The rest of the crew are dead. In a desperate bid to survive you must set the ship’s self-destruct and attempt to reach the escape shuttle. Add to Wishlist.
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The constant tension of being hunted, along with the eerie environment that is the derelict Sevastopol, turns this game into one of the very best survival horror experiences of all time. That said, pacing could be improved, as there comes a time when the Xenomorph stops being a threat and becomes more of a nuisance.
Just Like the Classics
Alien: Isolation might be one of the only games that use chromatic aberration to a positive effect. The game’s post-processing effects look fantastic, giving Isolation an authentic VHS-like feel that will make you believe you’re playing Alien in an old VCR.
Even though some textures might be a bit bland upon closer inspection, the graphics in Alien: Isolation work amazingly well. A terrific sound design is also part of the game’s outstanding presentation. The sounds of the Xenomorph stalking the hallways of the Sevastopol is the stuff of nightmares. The decision to play the game in an entirely first-person perspective also helps a great deal with player immersion. The fact that you can never know what’s lurking behind you will keep you on edge, no matter how much time you’ve been playing the game.
Close Encounters
Unlike games like Outlast, Amanda isn’t entirely defenseless against the Xenomorph. Our heroine has access to a variety of utilities that can help her survive the deadly Sevastopol, including a revolver, flares, and your trusty flamethrower.
Each weapon is better suited against a particular type of enemy: the revolver won’t work at all against the Xeno, but the flamethrower will become your best friend against the alien. There’s also a very basic crafting mechanic that will let you create some survival gear, but your best strategy is to avoid combat entirely and rely on stealth.
Once you get the flamethrower, encounters with the Xeno become more of a chore than anything, easing some of the tension that was present in the early stages of the game. That said, the alien can still kill you in one shot, so keep your eyes on the motion tracker whenever you can.
A survival horror masterclass, Alien: Isolation has all the makings of a true genre classic. The way the game handles tension, and its beautifully rendered environments, will keep you mesmerized from start to finish. Definitely a must-play for horror fans.
Pros:
- Outstanding Xenomorph AI
- Eerie ambiance and excellent visuals
- Amazing sound design
Cons:
- Combat can get very repetitive
- Some glitched instakills can ruin your experience
Most games ignore what made Alien such a stunning horror film: stillness and dread.
The Ridley Scott-directed Alien was a haunted house in space, while the sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens, was a war film. Cameron made an allegory about the Vietnam War, with a crew of soldiers decked out in the latest gear getting their asses handed to them by a low-tech enemy with a mastery of the environment. Cameron’s approach is much more suited to video games, for the obvious reasons, and it tends to be what we get from games set in this world.
One of the rare exceptions is Alien: Isolation, a 2014 survival-horror game improbably starring Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda Ripley. The game is currently free through the Epic Games Store, and this is a great excuse to jump back in and see what makes the game tick.
Locked in with fate
Isolation takes place between Alien and Aliens, and it explores what happened after Ellen Ripley went missing. The stakes are strange, as they always are in prequels, because we know from the films that Amanda Ripley died of cancer in 2178.
We understand where she ultimately ends up, which means she canonically survives whatever happens in the meantime. And it turns out at least one situation that happened in the meantime was pretty horrific.
The setup of Isolation is brutal in its simplicity: Amanda is tipped off that the flight recorder from the Nostromo has been found after 15 years, and she joins the salvage team in hopes of learning what happened to her mother.
Alien Isolation Download
What she finds is that the flight recorder wasn’t the only thing recovered; there seems to be a terrifying creature loose on the space station. It’s killing people one by one, and it seems unstoppable. Anarchy ensues, with survivors looking out for themselves, the synthetic life-forms onboard the ship willing to hurt people to impose order, and of course the alien itself, always present, always a threat, always keeping the stress of the player fluctuating between “oh god” to “OH SWEET JESUS.”
If you’re in the mood for a horror game, boy howdy is this ever an effective horror game. But if you don’t feel like you can handle a constant flood of low-level stress spiking into moments of panic? This might not be the best time to try this one.
Alien: Isolation is, for the love of Giger, an actual Alien video game. It is a haunted house in space, and you are not given an arsenal with which to fight back, nor are you trained to do so. Amanda is capable and smart, but she’s no superhero, and the alien can and will kill her with one hit if she’s not careful.
Alien: Isolation is, in many ways, a hypervigilance simulator. You should always be scared, because you are never exactly safe.
How did they pull this off?
The developers had to balance making the Alien scary enough to be a threat every time it showed up, without pushing the player to the point where they get too scared or frustrated and stop playing.
“To achieve this, the game requires two distinct behavior management systems: the ‘macro’ or director-AI and the ‘micro’ or alien-AI. The director observes the player throughout the game, always knowing your location,” Dr. Tommy Thompson wrote in a Gamasutra post about the alien’s behavior. “Meanwhile the alien-AI is driven by a series of sensors and behaviors that allow it to hunt the player down. The director’s job is to point the alien in the direction of the player periodically, to give it a hint as to where it should be looking. Despite this, the alien is never allowed to cheat: while the director always knows where you are, the alien has to figure it out for itself. You can fool it, you can surprise it and you can escape it.”
The alien reportedly teleports only twice in the entire game, and those two times happen in story-specific sequences where the alien needs to be at a certain point, at a certain time.
Every other encounter with the creature happens because it’s hunting you, and the director AI is nudging it near you every so often. It’s never told exactly where you are, but it’s given enough direction to constantly keep you on your toes.
If most video games are power fantasies, Alien: Isolation is designed to be a powerlessness simulator. Being hunted relentlessly by an unstoppable angel of death is very clarifying in the moment; there is never a good time to let your guard down, and every musical cue or sweeping sound from your motion tracker is enough to begin the paranoia. With a constant threat, your brain is never given a break to relax.
Alien Isolation
The Alien AI is fascinating, and Isolation is the best Alien game ever created. But even with some very inventive AI, the game has trouble standing next to its movie origins. That’s partially due to the fact that it’s easy to stay scared of a monster for an hour or two, but a 20-hour game presents much greater challenges with pacing.
“Alien: Isolation falls prey to the same failing that has come to be a persistent problem in the film universe: overexposure,” Polygon’s original review stated. “While Creative Assembly’s stated goal was to recall the solitary terror and tension of the original Alien film, ironically, Amanda survives more direct encounters with the alien in one day on the Sevastopol than her mother did in her entire life.”
That’s the challenge of the director AI: to keep the pressure up without overloading the player. But once you understand how to hide effectively, the alien becomes less an object of horror and more of a nuisance.
Alien: Isolation is designed to be a powerlessness simulator
Alien Isolation Game
“This overexposure undermines the power and terror the alien inspires,” Polygon’s review continues. “Every time I thought I heard the monster, every blip on my motion tracker, was a cause for a tightness in my chest at first. By the 300th time I dived under a table or into a locker, I wasn’t scared anymore — I was annoyed. Once the alien becomes an irritation rather than a force of nature, much of the horror in Alien: Isolation vanishes.”
Alien: Isolation is a tough game to finish, but a fun game to begin, especially now that it’s free. This is finally the Alien game the franchise deserves, and it never needs to devolve into an Aliens game to make its point. Its flaws may indicate that making a proper Alien game is next to impossible; what works and what doesn’t in games is very different from the same rules in cinema, but this is as close as we’re likely ever going to get, and that’s worth celebrating.
If you want to see how long you can tolerate fear, uncertainty, and yes, doubt, this is a must-download. Alien: Isolation will be free to download until April 29, 11:00 a.m. EDT.