Alien Isolation: Interactive Nope Simulator 2014

NOTE: As of writing this post, I am only a few hours into the main campaign and as such, am offering a subjective appreciation of the games execution, it's not a review, so I trust that the 2 people that eventually read this will not feel misled.

I read every single review of Alien: Colonial Marines, soaked in every scathing comment on reddit, watched as many gut churningly horrible playthroughs on youtube and read the history of the games troubled development...and yet, I still really wanna play that game. Why? Because despite it's patchy (an understatement) history, I believe the Alien franchise is the best license in videogames, I want to experience every aspect of it's attempted transition to games, the good and the bad. Horror is a wonderful, primal thing and cinema is littered with masterworks of the genre, but with videogames you are an active participant in the horror and that can be so much more terrifying.

The xenomorph (yes, I know what it means and I'm still calling it that) never scared me until I played the first Alien Vs. Predator game way back in the sepia tinged era of 1999. Chalk it up to being massively desensitized to blood, gore, jump scares and the macabre from an early age, but the big slimy space demon never really disturbed me. I loved the film, LOVED it, Alien remains to this day an indelible seal of quality on the sub genre blending of horror and sci fi, but it just never scared me.
AvP, on the other hand, absolutely terrified me.
I remember it clear as day, me and a friend crawling our way through the Marine campaign at a glacial pace, every step combined with a couple of tossed flares and at least a dozen glances at the motion tracker. The tension created by the lighting, hostile sound design and unforgiving map layout was tangible, HR Giger's aliens were now horribly efficient game over machines and they terrified me. AvP and it's fantastic sequel (not so much the 2010 version) are still my favorite horror games of all time.

When I heard that SEGA had given the license to Creative Assembly after the Colonial Marines debacle, I was cautiously optimistic. The Total War games are my favorite strategy titles and, while CA cannot be said to release a squeaky clean product (TW games are often riddled with bugs), they are capable developers with a proven track record of meticulous design. The premise seemed perfect- a canonical sequel that pitted Ripley's daughter against a single xenomorph in a protracted game of cat and mouse. Genius.
Needless to say, when the positive reviews started to trickle in, I purchased Alien: Isolation and in my time with it I have found it to be perhaps the best film-game adaptation of all time...certainly the most complete translation.

First of all, it looks and sounds spectacular. From the opening moments on a strangely familiar ship, to navigating the steam-filled corridors of the Sevastapol, the environments are ripped straight out of Ridley Scott's 1979 film, including the old school tech (even saving your game creates a flickering VHS-style blur for a second). The sounds - paramount in this universe - are wonderfully effective and the suite of clicks, scratches, hisses and roars the alien emits are hugely effective fear mechanics. Fear will be your primary feeling during this entire game.    

The first time you encounter the alien, there is no chance that it will ever kill you, it's a scripted setpiece in which the beast dispatches your NPC companion and you rush to an elevator to escape it. The elevator takes an absolute age to arrive and all the while the concussive blasts of music mix with the hisses and screeches of the unseen enemy. It's an excruciating moment, I was still on the edge of my seat even though I kinda knew the sequence was scripted. That's the key to Alien: Isolation's effectiveness, teaching you how to be afraid of death again.

There are no checkpoints, no quicksave function, no regenerating health and when the alien spots you it's an instant game over screen. Manual save stations throughout the game, which in the beginning seem spaced a forgiving distance apart, seem an eternity away when a genetically perfect killing

machine is hunting you and your last save was 2 hours ago. Creative Assembly know that being able to frequently save your game and sufficiently repel your foe is not scary...and they want to scare the piss out of you.
I'm not saying I'm happy about this. I've had my hand held for years now, the resilient child that braved endless game overs and restarts is dead, replaced by coward who gets frustrated when he has to retrace hours of gameplay because the alien heard his motion tracker. But that's not to say it's a bad decision, you should be afraid to die, you should be careful not to get caught by the xenomorph or get your head caved in by an android.

The game isn't a flawless experience, it mainly suffers because of a weak, familiar story and the poor execution of characters other than Ripley and her pursuer. Arguably, retreading old sci fi horror tropes and populating the narrative with wafer thin archetypes (paranoid survivors, evil automatons, shady corporate types)  is kinda the point. The original film and it's sequels were only ever about one thing, Ripley and Giger's demon, everybody else was expendable. This isn't an excuse, I'm not trying to gloss over the fact that the game is, essentially a poorly written rehash of events we've experienced dozens of time before, I am simply saying that it doesn't really matter. When Ripley is alone in the dark, with an unstoppable killing machine dogging her every step, this is every bit the Alien game we have always wanted.

As a horror game, Isolation is brilliantly effective at ramping up the tension to near unbearable levels of pant wetting terror. As an adaptation - and continuation - of one of cinemas great modern classics, it's a triumph.

I still wanna play Colonial Marines...