Alien: Isolation

On paper, Alien: Isolation shouldn't be as good as it is. Big budget "AAA" horror games had not been faring well in the years leading up to it's release, The Alien franchise in general hadn't seen a good entry in any form for decades, and it was developed by Creative Assembly, a talented developer to be sure, but not the immediate name one would associate with a first-person survival horror game. In some regard, the factors working against the game almost serve to make it shine ever brighter in the ways it executes on all of it's ideas to near perfection, even if it runs longer than you'd think.

First of all, I love the first two films in the franchise - and hey, I even have a slight soft spot for whatever the hell Alien 3 was - so the incredibly faithful adaptation of the world - of the 'tude - of the movies works wonders on me. I went in with an open-mind, and the assurance that I would at least derive some joy from the aesthetics; to the white, featureless paneling all around me to the bubble monitors with green text on black, but I was still unprepared for just how cool it would be when it all came together. As far as the increasingly vast timeline is concerned, Isolation is set fifteen years after the events of the first movie, featuring Ellen Ripley's daughter Amanda as the protagonist. A missing or deceased relative is often a tool used in horror to draw the primary character or characters in, but Amanda's quest not necessarily for answers, but simply closure is surprisingly effective in setting a sombre, morbid tone from the get-go.

Navigating around the Sevastopol station, this attention to detail helps sell the station as something that would have existed in the films, and as something that would have at one point been teeming with people living and working there, even if there is a bit of the stock standard post-disaster graffiti on the walls that feels a little tired at this point. Amanda arrives here with Weyland-Yutani executive Nina Taylor, and a Weyland-Yutani android Samuels, after hearing word that the flight recorder to the Nostromo is being held on the station, which could contain the answers she's been looking for all these years. There's so much atmosphere and lore to take in as your wander around the station at first you might not even notice that the titular creature does not even show up until two or three hours in, and it's here that the game truly begins.

The Xenomorph's introduction is one of the standout sequences of the game just from the way it slithers and unfurls out of the ducts above you to make it's arrival. Impossible to kill, dealing with the Alien really just boils down to avoiding it and not being spotted as you move through the hallways and rooms. Equipped with a motion tracker mapped to it's own dedicated button, and a small selection of craftable items and weapons, the core of the gameplay involves always knowing where the Alien is, and not being there with it. From flares to EMP grenades (more on why you'd need those later), it seems easy enough to get the Alien to look the other way. However, it's not always that easy. Items sometimes bouncing off of thing you didn't expect them to hit would occasionally send a noisemaker back at Amanda in a way that would immediately draw the Alien to make quick work of me, which was sometimes frustrating, but also just a little bit funny. This rarely resulted in too much loss of progress, though, as there are plenty of save points around, even though you move from one section to the next quite slowly. The save points also have a sort of cool-down to them, to prevent save spamming and also create some potent tension.

The Alien isn't the only source of danger on Sevastopol, there are still survivors among those who worked and lived there that have taken up arms both to loot and pillage, but also to defend themselves, all of whom aren't too thrilled to share with you. As well, the station's local androids - the considerably less life-like Working Joes - have turned hostile for the most part, and serve as one of the more unexpectedly creepy obstacles to overcome, even hitting them with an EMP grenade looked uncanny. The humans and androids are the only things that actual combat can be effective against, and for that purpose you have a few weapons you can use, but in true horror fashion ammo is scarce and you're often better served by using stealth to avoid confrontation. While the idea of dealing with anything other than the Alien might feel like it impedes the purity of the game, these sections actually break up the action to prevent it from being monotonous, or spice up the threat of the Alien appearing at any time by giving it another target to go after.

As well, frankly, the game needs these pace changing moments because if there is anything negative to say about about Alien: Isolation it's that it's too damn long. It took me probably close to twenty hours by the time I finally saw credits, which featured enough moments along the way where it looked like it was over but actually not to become comical. Having too much of something isn't that terrible a problem to be honest, but the narrative began to drag a bit in the middle as we kept going down this road with little to no success. The sections where you come across the beginnings of new nest of Xenomorphs could also feel tedious when you had to deal with face-huggers. While the Alien obviously kills you in one hit, it's huge and often very loud, so you know where it's coming from if you do happen to be spotted. The face-huggers, however, are tiny and quiet for the most part, making their own one-touch-kills feel cheap and frustrating, turning those segments into a memorization game of knowing from precisely what direction they will come and being ready to deal with them in a specific order. None of these section were very long, and there were only a few of them, so mercifully they don't impact the overall experience much.

What might be the best thing I can say about Alien: Isolation is that the complaints of the previous paragraph were things I really had to stretch to even come up with. Sure it's a little lengthy, and sure some sections aren't so hot - and those are definitely criticisms worth at the very least bringing up - but neither of those points really caused me to think less of the game. With horror games, the oppressive or unsettling atmosphere frequently tends to be the linchpin on whether or not the experience is successful, and if that's what you're looking for in Alien: Isolation I assure you that you won't be disappointed. Even without an appreciation for the source material, the game is just solid on every level. The major story beats and dialogue scenes are a bit rare, but they're still very well acted as for as performances go, in fact the sound design in general is top-notch. Visually it's excellent as well, both in art direction and in it's graphical fidelity. The gameplay may be slow and methodical, but in this kind of survival game, you wouldn't want it any other way. Every aspect comes together to make a package that is somehow even more than the sum of it's already excellent parts, making this a game that will for me become a new benchmark to hold survival horror games up to for this generation - and beyond - going forward.