Alien: Isolation - Aliens, Creative Assembly, and Ripley's daughter

So I’ve either gotten into the game’s groove or it’s getting easier or maybe a bit of both, but I’ve definitely been cranking along the past week or so. I’m actually a little surprised by my progress, but it’s assisted by the fact that you get moments of “downtime”, when you’re not being actively stalked. You’ll still come across the occasional person or android but they’re much easier to dodge and/or kill (though I’m trying not to kill any humans).

But I’m hitting another roadblock, and again it’s mostly psychological. At around the midpoint you’ll “defeat” the alien, though you know of course that you couldn’t have seen the last of it. That’s when you’ll hit a good couple missions of the downtime I mentioned. But I’ve hit the “return” of the alien and it’s very effective. Nothing you haven’t seen in any of the movies, though you could say that about the whole game. But it’s stressing me out, man!

I imagine this game is most effective for folks who were traumatized by Alien as children. It definitely pushes those buttons. But I agree with folks that it also kind of damages the xenomorph’ mystique - when you’ve seen it clomp out of a hole in the ceiling and walk right by your hiding spot and then disappear again, you can practically hear it saying “Where’d everybody go?” It definitely doesn’t feel like the sleek, unstoppable killing machine of the movies - more like a short tempered but seriously dumb animal. Which, who knows, may be more realistic.

It’s a bored space kitty.

A couple more missions in and I’ve hit a dramatic moment when Ripley makes what seems to me to be an odd choice. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that another character makes an emotional choice that actually seems logical enough, but Ripley opposes them. Which may seem needlessly coy for a 3 year old game, but I am nearing the climax (I think) and I wouldn’t really want to ruin that moment for anyone else. Guess I’ll just see how this plays out.

All right, so this will probably be my last post because - I did it. I beat Alien Isolation, finally knocking out a game that’s been troubling me since release. It was stressful, for reasons I’ve already covered, but I’m glad I did it. The experience was a good one, overall. But I don’t know that I can say that the game was a good one overall. Not really. Mainly, I just don’t think the experience they were trying to provide really worked. Not sure if that’s an inherent problem in attempting to bring the experience of the first movie to a game, or just the way they did it. But I do think this game kind of harms the mystique of the alien. You definitely feel that the alien is tethered to you, and will never be too far away even when you do manage to get by it. And, I’ll add, this is the case for the various android and human enemies you’ll encounter. If you sneak by them, they’ll just modify their patrol route to follow you, as if they subconsciously know where you are at all times but are trying to sportingly allow you the opportunity to keep avoiding them.

The scripted events work best. They really evoke the feeling of being stalked and trapped. There’s a really great “oh, I’m so screwed” moment at the end that really caught me by surprise. I also really enjoy these games that let you be a space engineer, like the Dead Space games do. It’s scratches that itch if you always wanted to be Montgomery Scott. And these guys made the environments so damned beautiful, in the sense that they look exactly like you’d think they should from the first movie. You’ll come across generators that have to be primed before being started, doors that have to be cut down with a blowtorch, monochromatic screens. It’s all low tech in the same way the movie was. I loved it.

So, thumbs up from me, for what it’s worth, but know what you’re getting into. I do think I made the right call dialing down the difficulty. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been any higher. I might never have climbed out of the lockers you could stash yourself in while you stare at the motion sensor and wait for it to stop beeping.

I was a big big fan of this game after going in skeptical. I loved the 80s GUI aesthetic so much, and the graphics were fantastic overall, plus super solid stealth mechanics and an excellent story. A nearly perfect licensed movie tie in game from my perspective.

Anyone play this with a VR mod?

Yes, briefly. I found it far more nauseating than immersing.

One thing I meant to mention but forgot - I was initially a little bothered by the game’s whole premise. The existence of Amanda Ripley is based on a deleted scene from Aliens (restored in the Director’s Cut) where Burke mentions to Ripley that her daughter had died in her absence of cancer at age sixty-seven. Implying that, whatever may have become of her, she did at least manage to have a fairly prosaic death. But the more I thought about it, the easier I figured this actually would be to retcon. I mean, Burke is a loyal W-Y employee, as we know from his fate. If, as we find out through the course of the game, events had been somewhat orchestrated by the company, why wouldn’t they be willing to do a little rewriting of history? They wouldn’t want the destruction of a space station and the deaths of its inhabitants to be public knowledge, they probably had a cover story all set up for this. It’s probably even less likely that Amanda would have made it back to earth to live in peace. Anyway yeah, I think about stuff like this.

I didn’t really see an innate contradiction between Ripley’s daughter having a life of rollicking space adventure and then quietly passing away from cancer as a sweet-looking old granny type. (Unless she died during the game, but then we didn’t play it right!) Although, as you say, if all this other shit was going on with an alien, it would require yet another Weyland-Yutani coverup of some kind. They appear to pretty much run the galaxy, so I guess it’s not too much of a stretch.

I always wished they’d left that bit in the theatrical cut, by the way. Though I suppose some might consider it a tad on-the-nose.

I don’t know that I find one outcome necessarily easier to buy than another, I just started thinking that all we really have to go on is the word of Burke, who is just another corporate tool. And if you were trying to talk Ellen Ripley into going back out on this expedition, it would make more sense to say your daughter lived a quiet, normal life and just died rather than oh shit, you know what? She totally went out and got killed by those very same xenomorphs! I’m not saying all this groundwork was put down intentionally thirty years ago, just that if you were going to retcon, this is a pretty easy lift.

Easier than retconning the Space Jockeys into beings who simultaneously created all life on Earth and then act like Jason Vorhees when you wake them from hypersleep

OHHHHHHHHHHH

Yeah this game was absolultely better than both of the recent Alien movies. No question in my mind whatsoever.

On execution, yeah absolutely. But the more I think about it, I feel like one way I was a little let down by Isolation was by how safe it played things. It was definitely made for people who saw the first movie and always wanted to play it. What if I had been Ripley, sneaking through that station, avoiding the xenomorph at every step? This game is for you. And like I said, it’s a beauty to look at, these guys definitely did their homework. Just felt a little lacking in … I don’t know if ambition is the word exactly, but it’s what pops into my head.

I know what you’re saying but imo is disagree a bit. I imagine selling a female protagonist + monster you canbot fight only hide and run away from was hard enough.

Where I do agree is when the game went Alien to full Alien II. It felt narratively unnecessary, but they seemed to want to work everything good from the films in.

But overall I loved the game. Hiding in a locker with an Alien looking into it was hard to beat in the annals of gaming, imo, and the game didn’t really pull punches as far as equipment goes either. Aside from the D-cell, nearly dead, incandescent flashlight.

Few years late but you’ll have to excuse as me I was fighting some sort of meaningful war in that time, which I lost, while others were… considering themselves entitled, I guess, and this is the life they demand…

When you make a stealth game there are a few basic principles you have to get right:

  1. Empowerment - the player feels in control of their environment and not vice versa.
  2. Recovery - from a bad situation is half the game, so it must be enjoyable.
  3. Mobility - you must be able to traverse freely to accomplish your goals.

‘Empowerment’ is the defining characteristic, so much so it never needs to be acknowledged or thought about, and this is where Isolation completely fucks up.

You have limited mobility due to open wider stages devoid of cover or a basic staple like a shadowing mechanic - therefore limited ability to scout your surroundings, which is a requirement for ‘empowerment’ - and the game often devolves into trial and error for scripted encounters with guards.

Recovery options are minimal and just aren’t too much fun. You can’t do something cool like grapple up to a secluded spot or dart from shadow to shadow - you run off and sit in a bloody cupboard of all things and wait for the mobs to deagro.

This is ‘disempowering’ because you can’t even see what is happening. So a method of evasion may be passive, but it still must feel like the player is in control.

What I really can’t understand is this was all a conscious design choice - to have the player feel hounded at low odds. Which is laudable, but it you are meant to create the illusion of being hounded and at low odds, ferchrissakes. You don’t embrace it and disempower the player by heading towards trial and error or random gameplay, then compound the issue by making recovery difficult and a chore.

What I can’t get - is these games nowadays have their budgets ballooned to ~50 million for production alone, predominantly due to design and engineering.

You can see the quality and professionalism with that, with this handcrafted art deco space station, much like Prey (another game with some design flaws and the classic amateur approach to story-teling, but nothing on the scale of this). It is high quality commerical art.

Yet the professionalism and insight into what makes a game good is seemingly unprogressed. There are many skilled visual artists and engineers out there, but development of the art of what makes a game fun to play is seemingly stagnant.

I just can’t understand how a multimillion dollar investment can be driven to completion, sell poorly because it isn’t fun to play as it makes some very basic conceptual errors - how on earth is it not addressed much earlier in the piece before the design is committed. Surely they knock up a barebone prototype and test it to see how it plays.

Finally - how on God’s green earth does a 50 milion dollar game end up without a jump or mantle button.

You can be killed by an unerring pincer movement as you are hemmed in by a coffee table and a knee high barrier.

Truly ludicrous. An embarrasment. That is C grade design in an AAA wrapper,

I hear people think it’s a shame because they tried something new. That’s not why it failed. It failed because the designers who made it couldn’t stop and recognise that their fundamental gameplay was not servicing their goals.

It needed to go back and be reworked to provide far more player agency, and leave disempowering events as change up.

I think that Alien: Isolation gave somebody a swirly back in middle school.

Oh, and… welcome!

That’s a heck of a first post! Welcome!

I was going to give you the prize for username with the most syllables but the prize is a copy of Alien Isolation, so, well then.

I pretty much agree with what you said. It felt like pure luck whether the alien spotted me hiding in a locker or just passed me by. There was pretty much no way to hope to recover. Stealth just felt hit or miss and it was difficult to know what I should have done differently.

They did do a great job with the environment and creating tension, but the tension frequently just morphed into frustration.

Confession time. I play this during the day. In small doses. On easy.

It might still be too scary.