Anyone who reads my inaccurately-named Monster Movie of the Week feature on this blog knows that I am a lifelong fan of the Alien franchise. So, I had been eyeing SEGA's Alien Isolation for a while, impressed with its take on the material and its inspiration from Ridley Scott's 1979 horror movie rather than James Cameron's 1986 action film, which video games have been relentlessly ripping off since it was released. Instead of being a shooter, like most games adapted from the series, Isolation is an intense survival horror experience and seemingly a spiritual successor to the old Commodore 64 Alien game. I also liked what I heard from its developers Creative Assembly, who in a series of videos prior to the release described the game's horrors in a hilariously quiet and deadpan manner.
Alien Isolation is a direct sequel to Alien and features Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda who was introduced in the extended cut of Aliens. Amanda has gone to work for the Weyland Yutani company but has an agenda to find out the fate of her mother, missing since the "loss" of the Nostromo many years earlier. At the start of the game, the Nostromo's flight recorder has been located and taken to Sevastapol, a station managed by the hapless Seegson company, known for making creepy chokebots. The station is in the process of being decommissioned but has also become home to some aliens, when Amanda arrives to retrieve the Nostormo's black box and get some closure about her mother's disappearance.
Isolation was released in October to some of the most schizophrenic video game reviews I have ever read. While most independent reviewers praised it-some effusively hailing it a "game changer"-other high-profile reviewers with outlets-such as IGN, Gamespot, and Polygon-were less impressed with it, citing the game's punishing difficulty, manual save system, length, and pacing. Strangely, many of the positive reviews seemed to hold up the difficulty and "pacing" as strengths of the game.
Having now finished Alien Isolation and contemplating the game's reviews, I wonder if it's time to stop thinking of "video games" as cookie cutter experiences that should all be played and approached the same way. Isolation is not your typical video game and I have been thinking about how it is best to be played. It took me about two months to finish Alien Isolation partially because I don't have unlimited time but also because this is an intense and harrowing game and I found myself needing to take frequent breaks from it. I played it mostly in the mornings because I didn't really like playing it at night (They mostly come out at night. Mostly.). The truth is, it's a demanding game and I wasn't always in the mood for it.
I don't know how most reviews happen at the big websites but I can't imagine anyone "cramming" this game and playing it in a week or two and having a good experience with it. I'm wondering if all of the griping about the difficulty and the save points is a function of people trying to blow through Alien Isolation as thought it were your typical shooter. This is a game that punishes cockiness. I took my time with Alien Isolation and thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn't pick it up necessarily expecting to finish a whole mission in one sitting. Instead, I was happy to play from save point to save point and consider myself lucky for not getting my face chewed off. As far as the difficulty, I rarely had to play any sections over and over again. Nor, did I ever lose a significant amount of progress for lack of a save point.
I come down on the side of thinking that the pacing is actually quite good. The game takes about an hour to really get moving but the setting, graphics, and art direction are so good that I didn't mind. This is also in keeping with the spirit of Ridley Scott's movie, which featured a similar slow-burn. The game also smartly alternates between sections in which the Alien actively hunts you and other stretches during which the beast is out of commission and your main antagonists are groups of human survivors or rogue androids called Working Joes which are a bit easier to deal with. This gives the player both a nice break from the intense Alien gameplay and also a good opportunity to explore and enjoy the setting, a compelling retrofuturistic environment. When the Alien is about, you really don't get a lot of opportunities to enjoy the scenery. There are a couple of sections that involve space walks and even a flashback to a stroll on LV-426 which also offer a respite from the intense Alien action and some beautiful space porn.
One of the things that I love about Alien Isolation is that it is more experiential than "gamey." Also, it doesn't feed into the typical video game male power fantasy. Most often in games you are cast as some over-powered gun-toting badass. That's certainly been a problem in Alien games which demote H.R. Giger's fantastic creature to cannon fodder. One could even make the case that this goes back to Cameron's sequel. But it is certainly not the case in Alien Isolation. As Amanda Ripley, the odds are stacked against you and the only real ability you have is to build some devices to fend off or distract your opponents. The game even teases you with an assortment of guns only to have you learn that you really are better off not using them at all. Your only real weapons against the Alien are Molotov Cocktails and the flamethrower and both of those will only drive the monster off for a second. As in Scott's original movie, the Alien is relentless and indestructible in Alien Isolation.
The Alien itself is a terrific adversary in the game and it has been said that it has advanced AI which actively learns from how you play. I did find this to be the case. I had gotten too comfortable hiding in the many lockers found in the Sevastapol station and I found that the Alien did get wise to me before long and it would invariably find me in these lockers and violently rip the doors off.
Most of your encounters with the Alien are unscripted and will change depending on your actions. Even late in the game I observed behavior that I hadn't seen in my early encounters, such as when I thought I was safe in one of the many small iris vents on the station and I turned around to discover the monster slowly crawling towards me. I didn't even think the damn thing could get in those vents and I might have gone the whole game without seeing that bit of behavior. Who knows what else the Alien is doing when you are not watching it? Maybe it does the dance number from Spaceballs.
It also is revealed that there is not one but multiple aliens on the station when a nest is encountered well into the game. I had mixed feelings about this as I was attached to that very Alien experience of surviving a singular creature. It was also frustrating from a gameplay perspective because I felt like I was being dropped into an Aliens game without Aliens weapons. Luckily these nest sections are fairly short. From a story perspective, I was confused by where these Aliens came from since there was no evidence of a Queen Alien on the station. Were the people on the station being transformed into eggs as in the famous Alien deleted scene? I would have been fine if this had been the case. In fact it would have fit right in with the game's wonderful devotion to Scott's movie-but it is never addressed in the game. There are just a bunch of eggs and facehuggers running around without explanation. And strangely, for all of the Aliens that are running around in the cutscenes, I rarely encountered more than one of them in the game at the same time (thankfully.)
The story is decent but a bit skeletal and there are some plot holes that are not really addressed. The characters are also a bit skimpy and underdeveloped. While Amanda is given a bit of personality and a compelling personal mission, no one else seems to have been given much development. The Weyand android who accompanies Amanda was potentially an interesting character but I felt like his nature was kept ambiguous and then awkwardly revealed. When he ended up being a compassionate ally to Amanda, I was interested to learn more but was confused by his character arc. I do agree with the game's critics regarding the sudden and anticlimactic ending but I feel this is symptomatic with larger problems with the writing.
The station is probably the most vividly fleshed out character in Alien Isolation and in many ways it is an extrapolation of the design aesthetic of the Nostromo ship from Alien. It is similarly lived-in and grimy and feels like it has a real history and context. It expands on the vaguely dystopian capitalist future hinted at in Scott's movie, full of sociopathic corporations and their exploited employees. You learn a lot about Seegson Corporation and the Sevastapol station by reading terminals throughout the station. The creepy Working Joe androids also inhabit this junky station. Unlike the lifelike Weyland Yutani synthetics, the Working Joes are not meant to pass for human but instead feature rubbery skin and raspy electronic voices. In the larger economy, they are probably meant to be cheap, entry-level androids.
The Sevastapol and its synthetic inhabitants are probably the most original and interesting concepts that Alien Isolation introduces to the Alien universe. Otherwise, you could make the argument that Alien Isolation is a bit too derivative of Ridley Scott's Alien. It would have been interesting for the game to have stepped out of the shadow a bit and not been quite so beholden to its source material. I mean, the ship in which Amanda Ripley arrives to Sevastapol is literally the same model of ship as the Nostromo. And the station itself is inexplicably identical to the large cargo section to which the Nostromo was attached.
Despite a few story flaws Alien Isolation is a fantastic game and a wonderful Alien experience. I can't remember another game that made me feel such genuine fear and anxiety. The gameplay is compelling and when I wasn't playing Alien Isolation, I was thinking about it. For fans of the Alien series or old-school survival horror games it is a no-brainer.
MISCELLANEOUS TIPS
Use Active Stealth: Don't be afraid to sneak around in the Alien's presence. As long as you stay behind cover, you should be fine. What you shouldn't do is spend all your time stationary and hiding. There are times when the Alien will be on alert and looking for you and will not just go away if you hide. As scary as it is, you need to move around. Use flares and other items to distract enemies.
The Vents Are Not Safe: It may seem like the iris vents are too small for the Alien to use but guess what, he can get in there! Unfortunately, some time you have to use them.
Lockers Are A Last Resort: The ubiquitous lockers on the Sevastapol may seem like good hiding places but they are noisy to get in and out and once you are in there you are kind of stuck. As I said above, it won't be long before the Alien catches on. Whenever possible, find yourself a nice table to hide under. As long as you are not in direct view and are not making noise, they are reliable hiding places.
Your Motion Tracker Tells You Exactly Where to Go: In addition to, you know, tracking motion, your Motion Tracker has a sliding bar along the screen's perimeter which tells you exactly where you need to go next.
Turn Off Your Mic Xbox One and Playstation 4 both feature a mode in which you can use the consoles' mics to pick up sound from your environment. So if your cat is meowing in your living room the Alien will hear it and kill you. And possibly your cat. Turn it off.
Patrick Garone
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