Gaming’s Scariest Moments, Issue #10: ALIEN ISOLATION is Terrifyingly Good
Gaming’s Scariest Moments is here today with a special issue after a lengthy hiatus. Eric decided that after a decade, it was finally time to work on beating Alien: Isolation. Gamers and gorehounds alike, please enjoy!
Licensed horror titles we have had over the years have been a mixed bag decidedly. We’ve had bizarre NES iterations of Friday the 13th (Purple Jason) and Nightmare on Elm Street (where spiders were your biggest problem). In recent years, we’ve been graced with a litany of asymmetrical multiplayer games based on properties such as Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Evil Dead, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. While these are successful in transitioning the look and vibe of the movies, I am personally tired and/or not interested in any of these, as they are essentially quick match multiplayer titles, which is a genre that doesn’t catch my attention. If you played one, you essentially have played them all (to me at least). The Alien franchise in gaming is one that has been around forever, with many highs (Alien Trilogy for PS1/Saturn, Aliens vs Predator PC/Arcade titles) and a few lows (Alien: Colonial Marines for PS3/XB360, the recent Aliens: Fireteam Elite) and some right down the middle (the Alien 3 Genesis/SNES versions).
I did leave one major Alien title out of the list above. I believe this title is the best version of them all, an example of translating a movie into a genre (first person survival horror) that perfectly represents what the movies were all about. A 20+ hour descent into fear and tension as even the most mundane tasks take on a true sense of terror and tension as you try to avoid the perfect organism. In anticipation of Alien: Romulus coming to theaters, I decided to pick it up and make it my mission to see it through to the end this time (more on that later). That, the game celebrating its 10th anniversary + the recent announcement of a sequel from original developer Creative Assembly, now was the time for me to write about it. That game is Alien: Isolation.
Set between the movie Alien and Aliens, the game follows Amanda Ripley (daughter of movie protagonist Ellen Ripley) as she finally is presented a chance for answers surrounding the disappearance of her mother following the loss of the spaceship Nostrom. The decommissioned space station Sevastopol has come into possession of black box recording from the Nostromo ship and is ready to turn them over to Weyland-Yutani. Ripley is invited for the ride, but quickly realizes on arrival that things have gone to shit. Something has ravaged the Sevastopol, and after a series of unfortunate events have stranded Amanda and the crew of the ship she arrived on, the Torrens, she must fight for her survival against the thing that has caused so much turmoil in her life for years.
When I first got my hands on this game back in 2014, the hype behind it was palpable. The game was officially canonical within the movie timeline, making it a brand-new entry in the Alien universe, which was a big get for publisher Sega and the developer Creative Assembly. I was intrigued by the positive previews at the time discussing tension-laded missions and the various androids and scavenger humans out to cause harm to you. The most intriguing aspect for me, by far, was the fact that there was only a single Alien in the entire game, a stark contrast compared to the rest of the other Alien games, where you fought endless waves of creatures. However, as I started to play, I realized my brain was simply not wired for what this game wanted me to do. I have become a more patient gamer over the years, committing the time needed to finish a game that I was truly interested in, and that just wasn’t the case years ago. After discovering this was not like the gunplay in other survival horror games like Resident Evil + not like the shooting mayhem of the AvP titles, I was quickly given a gut check about two to three missions in. It involved my first interaction with the Working Joe androids. The thing is, with this game, while you do acquire melee weapons as well as normal firearms, combat is not the focus and should be a last resort as the enemies are very strong and you can easily die within two or three hits (one hit only from the Alien itself, which is unkillable – you can only scare it off with fire briefly). I kept trying to fend off and kill androids with the only weapon I had at the time, a wrench used to open some locked doors throughout the ship. I just kept dying and couldn’t get into the rhythm of being stealthy through the level. I eventually dropped the game and moved on.
My revisit to the title this past summer led to some internal trepidation due to my failure to make it that far back in 2015, but I am so glad I did. I knew I couldn’t just shoot my way through Sevastopol, so I engaged this game at the level it wanted me to. I crawled and/or slowly walked through each mission of this game, taking my time to get from one objective to another while avoiding the malfunctioning Working Joe’s, the crazy human’s left to fend for themselves and the Alien creature itself. There were a few moments later in the game where I was able to let loose a LITTLE with my shotgun and flamethrower on some human baddies, but it was 90% “avoid everyone and run”. Alien: Isolation is truly one of the few games I have played in my lifetime to keep me on the edge of my seat through almost its entire playthrough. Sometimes it’s the frights of the Alien skulking around the hallways of the Sevastopol, just waiting for you to make a single sound so it can pounce and one-shot kill you. Most of the time, however, it’s just the anticipation of something around the corner. A murderous android, an unhinged survivor, the unstoppable Alien, maybe just malfunctioning equipment. You could go minutes, even an hour, without coming across any real danger, but the true fear of it is always present. Every minute alive feels like a mission accomplished, every task checked off on your plight to get off the station feeling like you just won the biggest grand prize ever. It also helps that there is no real autosave in the game, relying on old school save stations to keep tabs on your progression through the game. Get too greedy or make a mistake and you could lose a lot of ground that will need to be replicated.
The most impressive aspect of Alien: Isolation is its attention to detail. Since this is set between the first two movies, the technology on display should represent how the original 79 and 86 films looked, which compared to modern days, looked like a bunch of lights and overexaggerated designs on what future tech would look like. Alien: Isolation embraces the visual aesthetic and technology presentation of the original films and runs with it. Computers with endless green fonts and images, white padded hallways, walls with millions of lights on it representing “super computers” and every other iconic image of how the Nostromo and other space stations were represented in those films makes the jump to this game. Even the save station embraces the antiquated “tech” that the old films represented, a boxy phone booth like device that requires you to shove a keycard into it and wait a few seconds every time you wanted to save. The save station is an original creation for this game and has even made the reverse leap to the Alien movie universe as it pops up in the background of a scene in the new Alien: Romulus.
While I do somewhat get the occasional complaint from a few people that perhaps the game runs a tad too long – 20 hours is a journey for a game that relies so much on tension, evading and frayed nerves – but I ended up becoming quite enchanted by it as the game continued to throw every single kind of wrench possible into Amanda’s way. This is a great example of a publisher – Sega – allowing a developer – Creative Assembly – to make the game they wanted to make. A game of this design would have a HARD time getting ok’d today, and its refreshing to see the lack of studio interference on this project, trying to shoehorn in popular gaming trends of the time. We get hours and hours and sweat inducing nightmare fuel, making the most routine objectives seem like you have painted the Sistine Chapel. It’s a miracle we got this game, and I truly can’t believe we are getting a sequel. While I do have to be cautiously optimistic on that sequel – I believe Alien: Isolation sold fine, but who knows what kind of pressure will be applied to the developer in today’s world – I do trust publisher Sega to let them go wild in the follow-up (this is the publisher that handles the Yakuza franchise, so that is where my faith resides). Alien: Isolation is a requirement for anyone who enjoys horror gaming in any way, shape or form. It’s a classic, and it will shred your nerves to dust.
