This is Still the Scariest ‘Alien’ has Ever Been
Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation remains the scariest bit of Alien mythmaking since Ridley Scott’s 1979 original. Sure, the medium might have changed—Isolation is one of several video games in the expanded Alien universe—but despite the mechanical differences, the game is the closest the series has come to matching the claustrophobic and, excuse the pun, isolated scares of the original film. In space, no one can hear you scream, but as Alien: Isolation turns 10, I promise your neighbors will.
Creative Assembly’s stab at an Alien game was first unveiled in 2011, though an official announcement wouldn’t come until three years later. At the time, there was plenty of extended Alien lore available. There were novels, comics, and even other games. The first, appropriately titled Alien, was released for the Atari 2600 in 1982. That game, a riff on Pac-Man, was… fine? It fared better than another 1980s alien whose video game outing would end up buried in the desert, but Alien, despite the name, wasn’t really Alien.
Subsequent releases, whether Alien 3, the SNES Alien vs Predator, or Alien Resurrection for the first PlayStation, were all conceptually the same. They were IP slop. Some performed better than others, but the impetus was never to innovate. Instead, they simply mimicked whatever gameplay formula was popular at the time and shoved some Alien embryos down its throat. The strongest, a real-time-strategy game I was certifiably obsessed with, might be 2003’s Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction. It was an amazing game, but also not anywhere near the tonal or thematic intentions of the series’ origins.
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Aliens: Colonial Marines, Alien: Isolation’s closest contemporary peer, released a year before Isolation after years of swelling hype. Infamously, Colonial Marines failed to meet expectations and was met with both critical and commercial derision. I found that game to be intermittently fun, but still nowhere near the ideal of what an Alien game could, and probably should, be. After all, the thrust of the original film is Ellen Ripley’s survival. She’s resourceful, but she isn’t a soldier (Aliens notwithstanding). In fact, no one on the Nostromo is. As the franchise developed, the Xenomorph carnage grew more capable, and as a result, the titular beast became commensurately less scary.
I’ve contended for years that the ideal template for most horror games would be survival horror. As a Resident Evil, Clock Tower, and Silent Hill aficionado, I maintain stripping the player of conventional survival means is the best option for instilling terror. Some modern games like Doki Doki Literature Club or Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo are more akin to visual novels, but for true, classic horror gameplay, make it survival horror (and not, I beg of you developers, more asynchronous multiplayer games).
What’s most confounding is that Alien: Isolation was released long before the current boon of modern horror IP gaming. Sure, the current crop all but owe their success to the likes of Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th: The Game, but Alien: Isolation was a critical and commercial success despite mechanics that were firmly early aughts. By 2014, even the survival horror juggernauts had gone full-tilt action. And, sure, Alien: Isolation had some action, but for large stretches of the roughly 15-hour campaign, protagonist Amanda Ripley (yes, Ellen’s daughter), was defenseless.
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Instead, Alien: Isolation harkens back to the survival horror template of the genre’s heyday. The stalking, creeping Xenomorph, a marvel of contemporary artificial intelligence in gaming, cannot be killed, only irritated. Principally, Amanda must creep, hide, and distract as she navigates the Sevastopol space station after she and several crewmates are stranded there.
Survival horror, by design, isolates players from the tools of more conventional games. In many ways, the subgenre endeavors to strip away control. You can’t fight, you can’t flee. Instead, you must use what sparse tools are available to overcome ever-mounting obstacles or risk certain death. Decades of Alien games never endeavored for anything remotely close to that. In fact, horror games rarely, if ever, did.
Creative Assembly intentionally modeled their game after Scott’s original, even managing to snag Sigourney Weaver for small voiceover sections of the game. The canon expansion of Ellen Ripley’s story even featured a precise recreation of the original film in the form of downloadable content. Seriously, you can play Ellen Ripley in a video game right now alongside Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and the rest of the original film’s cast. In an era of legacy horror, Alien: Isolation preempted by taking it, quite literally, back to the original.
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As a result, Alien: Isolation is the scariest the xenomorph has been since 1979, and that includes Fede Álvarez’s admirable, though uneven, stab at rebooting the franchise with this year’s Alien: Romulus. Nothing has come close to Alien: Isolation and a key component of that is how true to Scott’s vision the game really is. Despite the change in medium, Isolation is distinctly and terrifyingly cinematic.
Part of that is the game’s mechanical design. There are conventional elements that, yes, remind you it’s just a video game. Loading screens, floating walls of text, and inventories for you to manage. However, at its core, in the moment-to-moment gameplay, those reminders dissipate. There’s a sparse user interface, movement is remarkably realistic for decade-old tech, and the xenomorph’s encounters are unscripted.
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Collectively, the game is an outwardly terrifying experience. Players are liable to spend extended beats hidden in one of the game’s many hiding spots, too afraid to even risk running into the alien (my partner, while replaying the game, has been hidden in a locker for, I kid you not, upward of six minutes at this very moment). Nothing in the franchise has been quite so scary since Ellen Ripley herself fled the Nostromo countdown timer, xenomorph in pursuit.
For Alien purists, Alien: Isolation is a known entity. For the uninitiated, it’s not only one of the best survival horror experiences around, but also the scariest slice of Alien pie since the first film. Maybe it’s a cliché at this point, but with Alien: Isolation, you will hear every footstep, feel every drop of sweat, and hold your breath as you slither under a table, hoping desperately the xenomorph doesn’t hear you. You’ll want to scream, and trust me—it’s a scream worth hearing.
Alien: Isolation is currently available to play on most modern consoles. If you check it out, be sure to let me know what you thought over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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