For all intents and purposes, Alien: Isolation is as close to a retelling of the original Alien as legally allowed while still adhering to the universe’s canon, hallow be thy name. And full disclosure, I kind of wish they had just retold Alien (1979), and just added a few sections for gameplay’s sake. I say that because the story here is.. eh. You play as Ripley’s daughter whom, while looking for her missing mother, boards the Sevastopol space station with a few colleagues who claim information about Ripley’s disappearance is onboard the station. Fast forward through a botched boarding attempt and a few minutes spent walking through an excessively unlit station and you find out you have more in common with your mom than you realize: there be aliens afoot. More than just that the androids, or “Working Joes”, throughout the station have gone haywire and started attacking all humans they encounter. And before you ask let me just say no, the family fun doesn’t end there. There’s a good few batches of human threats scattered around as well, just for fun.
To account for this dizzying array of scoundrels the game uses a crafting system for creating tools to distract or eliminate threats. I’m gonna level with you, this whole system feels quite unnecessary. Both from a practically standpoint and just from a gameplay perspective. I’m usually very forgiving when it comes to games adding miscellaneous mechanics that don’t fit the genre or enhance the experience. It artificially inflates time and complexity, but rarely is it invasive or annoying to me. Unfortunately, Alien: Isolation doesn’t skate by that excuse. I mean, need EVERY game be a scavenge simulator? I’m a wayward astronaut adventure, not a reject from Hoarders. This is made more obvious when you actually use the tools too and see how pointless most of them are, creating a resource scarcity/overabundance that incenses me to no end. The Medikit, Molotov, Flamethrower, and Noisemakers are the only items you should ever be making or using. Everything else is too clunky, too slow, and too costly. I’d take it a step further and say Noisemakers are 100% necessary. As it turns out patience can only get you so far. More on that further down.
Before we do though let’s wrap up the story first to the best of my ability. Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to be moderately spoiled. After a lot of meandering back and forth, meeting new folks you couldn’t pay me to remember the names or faces of, you finally find out this was all a bad case of the narrative acrobatics and you were actually unwittingly sent on a mission to retrieve the alien itself. I guess Weyland-Yutani had learned nothing from the first movie. It was at this point I fully checked out. There were genuinely parts where I forgot who I was cool with and who had betrayed me. Not because it was so complex but because it felt so textbook and safe. Which is a shame considering how much I admire everything else. From its gorgeous glossy cassette futurism aesthetic to the crisp sound design in every corner of the game it really is one of the most well-designed titles I can think of, with the exception of a bad case of the uncanny-faces syndrome. For goodness sake, the original Alien callback sequence where you played as the guy who found the alien nest is almost worth the price of admission alone. No, it’s the heart, at least in the story, that’s missing for me. Anyway, after just about everyone else is dead or forgotten you’re finally able to get the hell out of dodge after an EXTREMELY drawn out end-sequence. One fakeout is good form. When you do three fakeout endings with no end in sight is when I start to get annoyed in a way that no cinematic sequences can lessen the blow of. Yet finally it does end, and on a cliffhanger no less. One I doubt we’ll ever get closure on, but never say never. In terms of story I’d give the game a firm 4/10. Terribly boring and quite drawn out. Shave off a couple hours and characters and pull back on the wild goose chases and we’d be in business.
Now let’s get into the real meat of the meal. What everyone raves about without end. The Alien, and by extension, its AI. I feel a touch more lukewarm about this than a lot of other folks it seems. Technically speaking, everything about the Alien is impressive. The sound, the animations, the reliance on sound and your radar to know where the Alien is, the fact that if you’re caught, you’re dead. It has all the hallmarks of a fully realized horror experience, no ifs, ands, or buts. In practice though, the lines between scary and tedious become far too blurred. This frustration comes from two elements: your utter helplessness and the overreliance on the illusion of realism. The first one is more straightforward, so let’s knock that one out. While I’d say this aspect is largely exacerbated by the second element, it’s annoying on its own. When I say helplessness I don’t only mean the fact that you’re a one-hit kill. As I said, it’s a neat twist on the tag-like horror games that already inundate the genre. The issue is that your tools to hide and fight back also suck. They give you a rotunda of tools and gadgets to supposedly fight back. Not kill the creature of course, but slow them down. This is mostly untrue. Of the tools you have, only half of them are polished enough to actually use. Even then, they last about 5 seconds and give you about twice that time to haul your butt to timbuktu.
The reason this is so devastating is because of the illusion of realism I talked about earlier. The general philosophy the game takes is trying to make the Alien as responsive and dangerous as possible. Given that it’s you know, an Alien, it also has enhanced hearing. What this means is you’ll spend a lot of time running and hiding from it. Mostly hiding, as it is much faster than you. That’s not all though, If you hide too close to when the Alien gets in the same room as you, there’s a good chance it will find you anyway. Best case scenario, you’ll have to spend two minutes pre-hiding under a desk while it meticulously walks back and forth across the room as it searches for you. On its own this just encourages a more careful method of playing, but we’re STILL not done. As annoying as it can be to have to wait around on account of the architecture disallowing me to make a distraction, that can be forgiven. What can’t be is the obvious instances where the Alien sticks around FOREVER, because under all the realism is a perfect knowledge of where your player character is at all times. I suppose it’s to make sure you’ll still see the Alien even if you optimize for sneaky gameplay. It simply goes on too long, and little recourse from my crappy tools, I’m frequently left sitting still for 5 minutes, going out for 1 minute, randomly triggering the Alien 100 feet away, then having to go back to hiding. When I could I just doused the clown in flames and speedran through the section, but with limited flame ammo that was fewer than half of my interactions.
Don’t misunderstand me, it was visceral, it was cinematic, and it perfectly portrayed what the Alien should be on a realism level. Yet as a horror veteran, the waiting around in lockers and under desks, with the knowledge that it shouldn’t have found me when it did, left me bored in a way only remedied by sitting still for multiple minutes while I prayed for the Alien to dip. I’m glad they spaced out the Alien so it wasn’t constantly stalking you the entire game, however I think making it less obvious and frequent when the game forced interactions would not only add to the realism, but would further lessen the tedium that came with prolonged exposure.
Long-winded as it may have been, I feel a differing perspective is never unhealthy to flesh out. And don’t mistake my rant for hatred. My peak of agitation with this game never came close to tempting me to quit early. Not every interaction was hell. Only about a quarter of them ;) Holistically, this game has a fantastic presentation with a weak story, mediocre combat, and a should-be-better gameplay loop.
To account for this dizzying array of scoundrels the game uses a crafting system for creating tools to distract or eliminate threats. I’m gonna level with you, this whole system feels quite unnecessary. Both from a practically standpoint and just from a gameplay perspective. I’m usually very forgiving when it comes to games adding miscellaneous mechanics that don’t fit the genre or enhance the experience. It artificially inflates time and complexity, but rarely is it invasive or annoying to me. Unfortunately, Alien: Isolation doesn’t skate by that excuse. I mean, need EVERY game be a scavenge simulator? I’m a wayward astronaut adventure, not a reject from Hoarders. This is made more obvious when you actually use the tools too and see how pointless most of them are, creating a resource scarcity/overabundance that incenses me to no end. The Medikit, Molotov, Flamethrower, and Noisemakers are the only items you should ever be making or using. Everything else is too clunky, too slow, and too costly. I’d take it a step further and say Noisemakers are 100% necessary. As it turns out patience can only get you so far. More on that further down.
Before we do though let’s wrap up the story first to the best of my ability. Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to be moderately spoiled. After a lot of meandering back and forth, meeting new folks you couldn’t pay me to remember the names or faces of, you finally find out this was all a bad case of the narrative acrobatics and you were actually unwittingly sent on a mission to retrieve the alien itself. I guess Weyland-Yutani had learned nothing from the first movie. It was at this point I fully checked out. There were genuinely parts where I forgot who I was cool with and who had betrayed me. Not because it was so complex but because it felt so textbook and safe. Which is a shame considering how much I admire everything else. From its gorgeous glossy cassette futurism aesthetic to the crisp sound design in every corner of the game it really is one of the most well-designed titles I can think of, with the exception of a bad case of the uncanny-faces syndrome. For goodness sake, the original Alien callback sequence where you played as the guy who found the alien nest is almost worth the price of admission alone. No, it’s the heart, at least in the story, that’s missing for me. Anyway, after just about everyone else is dead or forgotten you’re finally able to get the hell out of dodge after an EXTREMELY drawn out end-sequence. One fakeout is good form. When you do three fakeout endings with no end in sight is when I start to get annoyed in a way that no cinematic sequences can lessen the blow of. Yet finally it does end, and on a cliffhanger no less. One I doubt we’ll ever get closure on, but never say never. In terms of story I’d give the game a firm 4/10. Terribly boring and quite drawn out. Shave off a couple hours and characters and pull back on the wild goose chases and we’d be in business.
Now let’s get into the real meat of the meal. What everyone raves about without end. The Alien, and by extension, its AI. I feel a touch more lukewarm about this than a lot of other folks it seems. Technically speaking, everything about the Alien is impressive. The sound, the animations, the reliance on sound and your radar to know where the Alien is, the fact that if you’re caught, you’re dead. It has all the hallmarks of a fully realized horror experience, no ifs, ands, or buts. In practice though, the lines between scary and tedious become far too blurred. This frustration comes from two elements: your utter helplessness and the overreliance on the illusion of realism. The first one is more straightforward, so let’s knock that one out. While I’d say this aspect is largely exacerbated by the second element, it’s annoying on its own. When I say helplessness I don’t only mean the fact that you’re a one-hit kill. As I said, it’s a neat twist on the tag-like horror games that already inundate the genre. The issue is that your tools to hide and fight back also suck. They give you a rotunda of tools and gadgets to supposedly fight back. Not kill the creature of course, but slow them down. This is mostly untrue. Of the tools you have, only half of them are polished enough to actually use. Even then, they last about 5 seconds and give you about twice that time to haul your butt to timbuktu.
The reason this is so devastating is because of the illusion of realism I talked about earlier. The general philosophy the game takes is trying to make the Alien as responsive and dangerous as possible. Given that it’s you know, an Alien, it also has enhanced hearing. What this means is you’ll spend a lot of time running and hiding from it. Mostly hiding, as it is much faster than you. That’s not all though, If you hide too close to when the Alien gets in the same room as you, there’s a good chance it will find you anyway. Best case scenario, you’ll have to spend two minutes pre-hiding under a desk while it meticulously walks back and forth across the room as it searches for you. On its own this just encourages a more careful method of playing, but we’re STILL not done. As annoying as it can be to have to wait around on account of the architecture disallowing me to make a distraction, that can be forgiven. What can’t be is the obvious instances where the Alien sticks around FOREVER, because under all the realism is a perfect knowledge of where your player character is at all times. I suppose it’s to make sure you’ll still see the Alien even if you optimize for sneaky gameplay. It simply goes on too long, and little recourse from my crappy tools, I’m frequently left sitting still for 5 minutes, going out for 1 minute, randomly triggering the Alien 100 feet away, then having to go back to hiding. When I could I just doused the clown in flames and speedran through the section, but with limited flame ammo that was fewer than half of my interactions.
Don’t misunderstand me, it was visceral, it was cinematic, and it perfectly portrayed what the Alien should be on a realism level. Yet as a horror veteran, the waiting around in lockers and under desks, with the knowledge that it shouldn’t have found me when it did, left me bored in a way only remedied by sitting still for multiple minutes while I prayed for the Alien to dip. I’m glad they spaced out the Alien so it wasn’t constantly stalking you the entire game, however I think making it less obvious and frequent when the game forced interactions would not only add to the realism, but would further lessen the tedium that came with prolonged exposure.
Long-winded as it may have been, I feel a differing perspective is never unhealthy to flesh out. And don’t mistake my rant for hatred. My peak of agitation with this game never came close to tempting me to quit early. Not every interaction was hell. Only about a quarter of them ;) Holistically, this game has a fantastic presentation with a weak story, mediocre combat, and a should-be-better gameplay loop.