by Joseph Knoop
There’s plenty of games that put you in the role of the hunted vs. hunter. You’re hopelessly outmatched against enemies with far more size and strength than you. We’ve seen it before in games like Outlast, Slenderman, and more commercial titles like the early Dead Space; heroes scraping by with nary a bullet. When you take that core concept--of surviving by the skin of your teeth--and boil it down to a single enemy far more terrifying than anything we’ve seen before, you get Alien: Isolation.
Players fill the steel-toed boots of Amanda Ripley, engineer and daughter to the Alien franchise’s original heroine, Ellen Ripley. After the Nostromo’s flight recorder is found and brought to the space station Sevastapol, Amanda takes a chance to find some closure to the mystery of her mother’s death.
Perhaps Alien: Isolation’s biggest fault, the unremarkable plot drags at a lethargic pace. Though one could argue that the original Alien film possessed an understated beauty in its slow, methodical pacing, it doesn’t translate quite as well here. In fact, you won’t even encounter the alien in any truly threatening context for nearly three hours into the game. Talk about a slow burn.
Mirroring that, a particularly damning element is that the game goes on for far too long without any real sense of progression. Amanda proves her chops by opening countless doors and activating an equal number of emergency measures, breathing life back into the station, but that’s just about all you do, even when it circles back to grander objectives. At a whopping 20-hour runtime, the mundane repetition becomes maddening.
Isolation’s cast does little to add to the universe, and simply mimic many of the same beats as the films. Dialogue is just short of believable, though certainly no worse than anything seen in Gearbox’s disastrous Colonial Marines. You’ll encounter the same gruff and distrustful types seen in any Alien film. The younger Ripley isn’t terribly inspiring, which is disappointing since the senior serves as the template for all modern action heroines.
But where the human element of Isolation drops the ball, the alien is more than willing to pick up, strangle, and puncture a couple of holes in it.
Although it is absent from an early portion of the game, once the Alien becomes a threat, it never, ever stops. At a hulking nine feet tall, the creature is one of the most well-realized enemies in all of modern horror gaming. This incarnation of the alien truly behaves like an animal, sniffing you out when close, and never adhering to a predictable path or behavior. If it sees you, be prepared to run for your life or die trying.
You’re not without defenses, though, minimal as they may be. Amanda is given various items that can serve as distractions. Throw a flare and the alien will investigate, but use too many and it will realize it’s being toyed with, adding a level of cunning to this foreign being. Also included in your arsenal are noisemakers, smoke grenades, flashbangs, molotovs, a couple of firearms, a flamethrower, and the iconic motion tracker. Each item is constructed from various bits of scraps and materials laying around Sevastapol, though they never seemed in short supply. I preferred the purist sneaking route, trying to avoid the alien as much as possible, but seeing as how I was repeatedly told my inventory was full, I can’t imagine running out often.
Coupled with your motion tracker, the use of sound cues are another integral method of surviving your nightmare. Isolation begs to be played with a set of expensive headphones or full-blown surround sound. Hearing the alien crawl through the claustrophobic, pitch black vents or stomp down a hallway towards the hospital bed you’re hiding under is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the entire game. I often determined the alien’s location just by listening for the hiss of airlock doors, or the telltale rumbling of air ducts. The alien can track you via sound too. Keep the motion tracker engaged, with it’s constant beeping, and the alien will rip you out of any locker you hide in. Throw a noisemaker in the middle of a group of hostile humans, and the alien will take care of them for you. Sprint down the hallway and the alien will most certainly hear you. It’s this constant risk and reward that makes Isolation a truly terrifying experience. Do you stay under the desk until the sounds of the alien die away completely, or do you risk sprinting to the nearest elevator?
Regretfully, far too much of Alien: Isolation relies on trial and error. Part of the beauty of never knowing exactly where the alien could appear next results in a lot of inescapable situations. Combine that with an infrequent manual save system, and you’ll lose over ten minutes of progress, oftentimes more. This can be frustrating when half of that time is spent crouching under furniture waiting for your motion tracker to pipe down. The fact that the alien seems to be invisibly tethered to whatever area you happen to be lurking in (often with multiple floors) only adds to the problem.
You’ll gleefully dread most of your time in Sevastapol Station, however. The derelict station, abandoned after years of financial and personal neglect, houses the scattered remains of its workforce, many of whom have become hostile in the face of anarchy. Ripley manages to piece together the doomed history of the station as it’s slowly shut down shortly before the mysterious alien arrives. This is done primarily through message logs left in old computers and environmental cues, like the bodies of the alien’s victims. Developer Creative Assembly takes their lo-fi sci-fi approach to heart, harkening back to the original Alien with a 1979’s take on the future. Computers hum and whir with the machinations of dusty analog setups, rather than the overly sleek, polished look of something like Prometheus. It all goes so far in convincing you that Sevastapol was once a real place, lived in by any number of regular, average people, which is a fancy way of saying there’s a lot of crap lying around.
Graphically, the game delights in playing with shadow and lighting. Smoke and airborne debris flitter about in a convincing fashion. Fire, one of your primary weapons against the alien, shines as bright as one might expect, illuminating whatever dark hall you may find yourself in. You’ll find yourself scurrying back to whatever hole you climbed out of each time a shadow flickers in the distance.
Unfortunately, the people inhabiting this once lived-in world, and the Working Joe androids serving them, feel less alive. Working Joes, far more primitive than their Weyland-Yutani counterparts, walk the same paths over and over again, only breaking from routine when their malicious programming goes haywire. Humans are more inclined to shoot, but act just as robotic.
Alien: Isolation is arguably the best video game incarnation of the Alien franchise to date. Despite a lackluster story and little sense of progression, the world of Sevastapol Station is one of the most convincing visions of space age terror. Once the alien arrives, with its salivating mandibles and carnivorous demeanor, you’ll likely enjoy your time as much as dreading it. Much like Dr. Frankenstein, Creative Assembly has brought a true monster to life.
