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:
- Empowerment - the player feels in control of their environment and not vice versa.
- Recovery - from a bad situation is half the game, so it must be enjoyable.
- 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.
What the hell, this came out in 2014??
Bought this on an xBox sale a few months back and fired it up over the weekend as my Halloween game this year (the original plan, but it went on sale so infrequently, that I jumped on the last sale months ago).
Enjoying the atmosphere and set decoration a lot so far - on chapter 3/4 I think.
I love this game. I may need to play it again on hard difficulty.
Hmm …
If it’s the same dev, I’d be intrigued…
I hope so. I loved the original. It’s one of a very few games from the last few years that I’ve played repeatedly to the end (including Nightmare difficulty – and I typically steer clear of extreme difficulty modes). If Creative Assembly is the developer, I’ll be there in a heatbeat. :)