Stealth game filled with surprises

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This article was published 30/10/2014 (4212 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was said that it could never be achieved, but the team behind Alien: Isolation have done it. They’ve harnessed cutting-edge technology, wrangled a multimillion-dollar budget and turned what was thought to be impossible into a reality: they’ve put Tom Skerritt into a video game. We live in an age where the technology to digitally replicate his moustache finally exists.

Alien: Isolation isn’t the first game attempting to translate the iconic Alien franchise into the world of video games, nor is it even the first to bring back actors from the series as a way to tie into the mythology of the films, as evidenced in 2013’s dreadful Aliens: Colonial Marines, which dragged back Aliens star Michael Biehn to give a performance in which his seething contempt for the material he’d been handed delightfully seeped through in every line reading.

It is, however, the first Alien game to genuinely feel like an Alien game. The first thing you see upon starting it up is the 30-year old 20th Century Fox logo, the same one that played before the first film in 1979. It’s not the subtlest of opening gestures, but it feels like an olive branch to fans, a sign that this might be the time they actually get it right.

Isolation is about as uncompromising as a corporate-funded blockbuster can be. This is a stealth game that takes away many of the conveniences of modern gaming — checkpoints, autosaves, recharging health — and boils things down to a primal level. You’re the hunted. The alien is the hunter. Survive or die.

You are playing as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen. Ripley is searching for her mother, whose ship Nostromo is missing, and winds up on the space station Sevastopol where Nostromo’s black box has been located.

Unfortuately, the Sevastopol has been severely damaged and most of its crew killed by a relentless xenomorph.

The H.R. Giger-designed creature is a completely randomized creation and it scours the environments of its own accord, with every turn of its oblong head or swing of its tail as unpredictable as the last. You spend much of your time huddled under desks, glancing nervously at your motion tracker, waiting for that tiny horrifying dot on the screen to blip away so you can make a mad dash for the door.

There are other enemies, including bandits who shoot to kill and red-eyed androids turned homicidal by a glitch, but they smartly appear as nothing but obstacles in your quest to survive the alien. Bandits can easily be killed, but a single gunshot will draw the alien from its vents to kill everything in its path. Androids can’t run, but their methodical stalking will pressure you into mistakes that draw the creature’s attention. Everyone and everything’s a threat simply because it has the potential to alert the greatest threat.

Appearances by Weaver, Yaphet Kotto and Skerritt reprising their roles from the first film are a nice touch, as are treks through locations that will be familiar to fans of the series, but it’s still the drooling, chest-bursting star of the game who gets and deserves the spotlight. The alien will drag you from out under tables, chase you into vents and continually eat your face, but it’s hard not to love the slimy little guy.

 

Mel Stefaniuk is a freelance writer whose love of both video games and writing have been intertwined since growing up with the text adventures of the ’80s. He can be found on Twitter as @DisgracedCop.