Ridley Scott’s Alien is still an amazing movie. 36 years later its “future technology” has aged. Computers slowly render the information in 2 colours on a CRT monitor while their hard drives make lots of noises – this feels like it has no place in space flight of the future, even though space flight is usually planned to have cheaper more durable hardware installed. Yet, so many people grew up on the sci-fi with this technology, myself included. And the costume and set designers tried their damnedest to create something tangible, something real, something one would want to visit. If if that beautiful and outdated set is populated by a terrible alien creature which is as much a cultural icon as this type of sci-fi itself. How many games tried to do Alien. How many failed. And most aimed to be something closer to Aliens anyway, something action heavy and lighter on horror theme, not a pure chilling horror in space where no one can hear you scream. Alien: Isolation is hear to fix this unfortunate error.
Alien: Isolation is survival horror. I’ve spent years being especially nerdy in my attempts to point out that survival horror is a specific sub-genre and not every horror themed game. So if Amnesia or Outlast were horror stealth, Alien: Isolation is, mechanically, as close to what we used to call survival horror as it could be. There are enemies you can avoid, exploration is extremely important and the world is interconnected, you must plan out your resource usage, you must solve puzzles (simple ones, but hey, it’s not like you had to think hard on Resident Evil puzzles), you have backtracking which involves unlocking previously locked places with new tools and, of course, everything is horror themed. This is the first time an Alien game got this close to focusing on horror since, well, probably the mostly forgotten Alien: Resurrection for PS1, though a recent Aliens Infestation had its heart in the right place.
Since I’ve spent so much time talking about Alien in the first paragraph, it’s easy to guess that this game was aiming at recreating the mood of the original movie. And it succeeded. It looks beautiful and feels like a perfect continuation of the original. Though, occasionally it also reminded me of another horror game – Dead Space. Or more specifically its sequel. Some parts of the Sevastopol (the space station you find yourself on) in parts feels a lot like Titan, and the graffiti and incidental “environmental storytelling” feels a bit too heavily influenced by that game, rather than being completely a unique thing. It’s like this concept was just taken wholesale from Dead Space or Bioshock without even adapting it to the needs of the story. But hey, it’s a minor speckle in an otherwise stellar looking game.
Sound is as amazing. The soundtrack often references the original Alien, but as an in-game tool it also works wonders. Also just like Dead Space, it often helps the players through sound, but without outright “spoiling” something. Though, by the end it becomes so loud you can’t hear any of the in-game sounds, which is a bit of a problem. The sound design here is so good, that you can, in theory, play the whole game without using the motion tracker – just using the sounds of the world to understand what is happening and where. Though, of course, game sometimes uses it to imply things that are not in reality happening, because this enhances the horror.
Yet, most of the time things are happening. And the gameplay is both amazing and incredibly frustrating based on the scene. The basics are brilliant – you focus on stealth and not being seen, you have a very limited amount of weapons and tools to defend yourself or create a distraction, you have limited ability to save progress, the maps are well suited for the mechanical needs and there are 3 distinct kinds of AI. You have human survivors, who can be neutral, but if they’re not they will try to attack anything that’s not part of their group. There are horrifying androids who might not attack you based on the situation, but when they do, they are hard to stop. Yet they do not attack the xenomorph. And then there’s the Alien, who’s often present in the background in most maps, but might not get out and attack unless you or someone else make noise and attract it. When it works well, it’s amazing – you’re trying to stealthily and quickly complete your objectives and if possible make one AI group fight another, while escaping unscathed. But its very common that the game decides to force some “new exciting situation” on the player which frustrates. And it’s also a very very long game.
Sometimes, instead of leaving you to your devices, the game forces some confrontation, giving you limited possibilities of response. If this involves humans or androids, it can be manageable. But every time it involves the xenomorph… Ugh. I like the fact that you can’t really kill it, you’re not a soldier with a pulse rifle, it’s fine. And it’s fine that if it gets you, you just die. At leat in theory. But gameplay-wise this is just obnoxious. There are sections where you are constantly hunted by the Alien, whose AI is semi-randomized and whenever it touches you, you die. And it just gets tedious after a while. When the Alien is used as an unknown element on a map, something that can change the situation drastically, so you adapt – it’s super fun. But when it’s just chasing you all the time and is on a rubber band with the player (always knowing when you’ve gone to the next location instead of staying where it was) – it gets really annoying.
There are also bugs and the like in the game. You can revisit most of the locations up until a certain point, yet the game doesn’t seem to be always designed for that. There are level changes that happen during the story that are sometimes not shown from one level when seeing the other (there’s a location that becomes engulfed in flames later on, yet it remains pristine when looking from the windows in another location). There are sometimes old script flags going off wildly, showing or talking about things that happened hours ago. Also the save stations are not always placed in such a way where backtracking is fun. I once lost almost 20 minutes of backtracking because I didn’t encounter a single save station along the way and then a sudden xenomorph jumped me. So I had to restart the whole chapter.
And jeez it is a long game. When you’re hiding from the killing machine in shadows for 20+ hours of one game, a creature that can erase several dozen minutes of progress, it gets really old. And the story seems to suffer from that as well. It starts great, but then it goes for a twist after twist and the final section of the game is just farcically over the top. You could easily cut more content from the game, make it 5-7 hours shorter and it would only get better. Season Pass was especially weird because of this, though every DLC turned out to be questionable anyway. I mean, the recreations of the scenes from the original Alien are silly, but kinda cool. But more survival mode content? Come on, I’m already tired from the main game, and now you want me to play some story-less stuff with more hiding from the xenomorph to get points? Useless, especially since the main goal is to get on a leaderboard that is populated by cheaters anyway. You can ignore the DLCs.
At the end of the day, though, is Alien: Isolation the best game in this universe? Most likely. If it’s not the best, it’s most definitely one of the best. Is it a good first person survival horror with stealth emphasis? Yep. Is it beautiful? Very. Should you play it? Very much so. Do I want to replay it? Not for a very very long time. I feel like if the game was shorter but even more packed with cool elements, if it had more of the System Shock 2 level design with hacking the security systems or what not, if it was even more about different AI groups interacting with each other, it would’ve been better. Hopefully, we might some day get a sequel that does that. And not more Aliens.
