Preview - Alien Isolation
We don't blame you for rolling your eyes at another Alien game. After all, most of them have been pretty rubbish, including last year's Aliens: Colonial Marines that is still going through pretty hefty lawsuits as a result of alleged false marketing. But there is genuine hope that Alien Isolation could actually live up to what the movies represented. How? By embracing the horror.
The Xenomorphs are some of the most fearful creatures ever imagined. Huge, stalking beasts with piercing teeth and cutting claws, it's safe to say you wouldn't want to go face-to-face with one. Creative Assembly - the studio behind the hit strategy series Total War - recognised the terror and came up with a fascinating concept: What if you weren't just shooting down hundreds of Xenomorphs with powerful guns? What if you were a vulnerable human on the run from a lone predator with little to no weaponry in an abandoned space station? It's a frightening thought, and it turns out Alien Isolation is frightening to play as well.
You take control of Amanda Ripley in the year 2137, 15 years after everything that happened in the original Alien film and 42 years before the events of Aliens. Amanda is the daughter of Ellen Ripley from the first film, and she's pretty confused about the disappearance of her mother. So confused, in fact, that she wants to investigate matters for herself and clear everything up. Amanda and a team get transferred to space station Sevastopol, but unfortunately for them it appears they're not alone...
That's the basic narrative behind Isolation, and this is a survival horror game right down to the last detail. If you're walking through dark corridors and you make a loud noise, the Xenomorph will track you down and within seconds you'll be dead. This means you have to creep around a lot, taking your time to assess your next move and doing your best to remain quiet and out of sight. It certainly makes for a tense experience.
Making things even harder is the AI of the Xenomorph. It doesn't just follow a predetermined path for you to figure out and work your way around, it actually hunts Amanda with sound, smell and sight and becomes smarter as the game progresses. For example, if Amanda throws an object to the other end of a room to distract the Alien, it'll rush over to it, take a long look and wonder what happened. If Amanda does the same trick a second time, the Alien will again investigate but it'll remember seeing the object before and it'll spend less time examining, making your escape even harder.
"It's a nice way of keeping the game fresh," senior designer Gary Napper tells us. "You find yourself in a situation as a player where you can't go, 'Oh I'll go in and hit that switch and do this,' it's more like, 'Right, this is my plan but if it doesn't work I need a back-up,' and it's much more real and much more grounded. Also because it's systematic, if it goes wrong and you die, when you come back in it's a different situation again. The Alien could be in a different location, it could be in a different state, you never know."
The Alien is so damn clever it even notices when lockers or air vents have been opened, and it'll do an area search to see if there's anyone there who opened it. Going up against a Xenomorph who can not only tear you to shreds but can also use its own brainpower to track you down is a pretty fearsome prospect - does Amanda really stand any chance at survival?
Fortunately enough she also has a few tricks up her sleeve. Hiding and crouching behind objects might not seem like much of a skill, but it definitely helps to get out of the Alien's line of sight and into relative safety. She also has a flashlight to maneuver in the dark and a motion tracker that pinpoints the whereabouts of the Alien when you bring it up. Beware, though, as both of these tools create light and noise which could lead to your discovery so you have to use them wisely. Amanda has the ability to hold her breath when hiding to avoid making any sounds at all, and there's also a crafting system that will help you out later on in the game, but don't expect anything too advanced.
"The crafting came about because we thought, what would we be able to do if we were in this situation?" Napper explained. "And we thought, we could probably wire something together to make a lot of noise, and we might find some emergency flares somewhere, or find something that can make a lot of smoke, I don't know. It was that kind of approach, we didn't want anything too hi-tech like radar jammers or mines or anything like that. But in that kind of environment, building what you can to survive, they really felt like they belonged there."
Brilliantly, the whole setting has been built with the film in mind, so this is a 1970s vision of what the future would look like. There are big, bulky keyboards and huge blocks for monitors that would look out of place in today's world, let alone the year 2137, but it's an ode to the first movie and the hardcore fans will love the atmosphere it creates. Just exploring the inner workings of the space station becomes a joy.
There's no doubt Alien Isolation is looking like one of the scariest games of the year, and we're hoping an extended time with it will have us shivering in our shoes. Apparently there'll be sections in the game where you'll come into contact with other human enemies and you can stop hiding for a bit, but the majority of Isolation will have you peering round corners and hiding in lockers, on the run from your deadly adversary. This is shaping up to be the game that Alien fans have been waiting for.
