Alien: Isolation (PS4, 2014)
Alien: Isolation is a first person horror game set in the Alien universe. You are Ripley (not that one) and you end up on a ship going out to a space station that's intercepted the flight recorder from the Nostromo. Once you get to the station you have a nice relaxing time.
Alien: Isolation is one of those games I've always heard is good but have never got around to. I've only recently really appreciated how good the original Alien movie is (this is the only one of the originals I've seen, Prometheus and Covenant are both terrible) so my thoughts on the series' world are relatively fresh. The game mostly takes place on the Sevastopol station which is orbiting "the gas giant" which I thought was Jupiter until about the halfway point. Things aren't great on Sevastopol though - it's in the aftermath of complete societal breakdown. What people are left shoot on sight, the androids have gone rogue and are killing people, and there's a funny noise coming from the air vents.
The game's world building and atmosphere is one of its biggest strengths. The design of Sevastopol is highly faithful to the films, with that strange minimalist 70s/80s vision of a technological future realised in consistent, eerie detail. It's dark, it's cramped, you see strange silhouettes out the corner of your eye when you enter a room that make you double take, it all looks like a horrible place to spend any time, let alone live. Which is what all the best science fiction horror does. The minimalist soundtrack adds to this feeling too, with only harsh mechanical sounds of the failing tech around you for company.
My initial impressions of the environment and the people were about as complimentary as they could be - the game reminded me heavily of BioShock. In fact there's a section near the start which looks like a complete copy of the Rapture Metro station you first arrive in. The influence in the game's world is obvious, but it goes beyond that. There are the usual text and audio logs you can find dotted around, as well as little bits of aftermath of people fighting or locking themselves in a room. There's a strong sense of what was lost on this decommissioned station, and if you're really familiar with themes from the film series about Weyland Yutani and androids and everything there's even more for you to enjoy. One of the game's major themes is the lack of agency an individual has compared to big corporations that are exploring and colonising space, and the way this is depicted is very effective.
One other thing I should mention about the environment is the sense of scale. Occasionally you can see out of a window. You can never really see all of Sevastopol, or all of the planet it's orbiting, or all of the ship that you arrived on. This creates a sense that the people on the station are completely dwarfed by their surroundings, but it feels oddly insignificant itself. Rather than make the station or planet loom large and make me feel small, it just makes the surroundings themselves seem irrelevant. It's hard to feel any sense of grounding in where you are, and if this is deliberate the result just isn't any good. While the immediate sense of the environment is engaging, even after playing the game three times I'd be hard pushed to tell you what any areas are called, or any distinguishing features about them.
Much as I'd like to I can't really avoid the alien any longer. The alien pours itself out of the ceiling every now and then to put the fear in you as you're trying to navigate your objectives. Avoiding it is always a genuinely tense experience. First you freeze, then you try to hide, then you realise you need to be completely still otherwise it'll see you. You can crouch and move round a corner or an object to get out of the way and hope it leaves you alone long enough for you to get away. The design of the alien is still as... alien as it always was, and seeing it close up is striking. Every aspect of its design is just nasty. It's impossible to look at it and think of anything other than fear, or imagine anything positive coming from its existence. It's there to do horrible things to every life form it encounters.
As a first person stealth horror game there are limited options for avoiding enemies. Obviously staying quiet and out of sight are the big ones, but you can find weapons and resources to craft tools with. You have a few weapons for dealing with people and androids, and eventually you get a flamethrower that can briefly ward off the alien. For all the options here though the best option is almost always the noisemaker which you simply throw in the opposite direction from where you're going at any given time. You're gently nudged towards avoidance because aiming and reloading the weapons you get is a frustratingly slow experience. Ripley (not that one) is a 20-something girl, so the idea that you're vulnerable and have to rely on stealth and cunning rather than brute force is constantly in focus in everything you do.
Here's the thing. Just about everything on Sevastopol wants to kill you. This I can work with. It's a reasonable assumption that any other beings in a stealth based survival horror game will come after you and do bad things if they catch you. You can have some differences in that to keep the player guessing and it still works. Androids whose eyes are white are fine, but if you're somewhere you shouldn't be or hostile they'll be red and they'll start chasing you. This is reasonable and logically consistent. Where the logical consistency starts to falter is the people. Sometimes there will be people in an area you have to go in and not only will they not immediately start shooting at you, Ripley (not that one) will talk to them as if they're friendly. Usually you find this out when you've been sneaking around the perimeter of a room and you're actually more visible than you thought.
Hostile humans usually will at least wait a minute, telling you to go away or they'll start shooting. In a setting where societal order has collapses this makes sense. What doesn't make sense is these humans all knowing there's something going around the station. Some undefined, unseen monster that's attracted to noise and which eviscerates anyone it finds when they make noise. So why does everyone start shooting at you when they know the alien will show up? Why, in the game's final chapters, does the station's "security force" show up with body armour and shotguns and itchy trigger fingers? It's so you can bait the alien into killing them all for you while you hide in a vent, but it makes no narrative sense for the majority of the game's enemies to act the way they do.
On that note, the androids are shit. They're a bit creepy because they're designed to obviously not be human (you know, unlike the androids in Alien) but they're not threatening. Mainly because they all move at walking pace as they come after you so it's easy to run away and hide, or bait them to go round a table after you and then run in the opposite direction. Or to line up a headshot. Eventually the game contrives to make it harder to take down androids by putting them in rubber suits to make your electricity-based weapons useless, but you can still just walk quickly away from them so it doesn't make a difference.
As striking as the game's setting is, the only thing you really remember about this game is atmosphere. I don't like comparing games to other games when I write them up because a game should be judged on what it is rather than what it isn't, but I'm going to bring up the BioShock comparison briefly. However long it's been since you last played it, do you still remember different areas and enemies? Medical, Arcadia, Fort Frolic? All the different types of splicers? Well, I couldn't tell you any of the locations in Alien: Isolation. I couldn't tell you why I went to any of them. Some areas - including the medical wing - have a character in them you work with for ten minutes before the alien turns up and snatches them into the darkness. The game is ultimately very thin on plot and this extends to moving you into different areas with little or no explanation or reason why other than it just being the next spot you need to reach.
What makes this all the more fun is that just about every location you visit in the game is repeated. You need to backtrack through a bunch of places. If anything this makes the game even more confusing. I said Sevastopol is supposed to be overwhelmingly large - and there's a 'Nightmare' difficulty level which doesn't let you consult the map - so I don't know if repeating areas is done deliberately to disorientate, but by the time the game does this it's really started to wear out its welcome, so rather than engender a sense of futile despair you just end up trying to rush through areas you were previously exploring carefully, longing for them to be over.
To this end, the alien ends up being a pain in the arse. Everything I've said about it is true. It's tense, it's scary, it's a genuinely fearful experience trying to hide from it and avoid it. Then you get about halfway through and you really start to want to get off the station but oh no look what's slithered out of the ceiling again. Yep, going to dodge you the same way I did before. Oh no! You're screaming! Very tense. Go away and stay away for more than twenty seconds at a time please, I don't have time for this.
I need to mention a section near the end of the game just to show you how obnoxious it can be. You need to go through a door. To unlock this door you need to sneak through a partially blocked off sequence of rooms to get to a switch. When you hit this switch the alien will appear and start chasing you. You sneak back to the original door and try to open it. The power supplying this door then fails, so you need to go back to where you were before and hit a different switch to get the power back on. This happens quite near the end and if I wasn't irredeemably stubborn or valued my time I would probably have uninstalled right here and never thought about it again.
You know how in a horror movie with a monster in it you don't really see it much? The film will last between an hour and a half to two hours, the monster will gradually pick off the cast one by one and we don't really see it? We only see glimpses of it, or what it does? You know how the original alien does this and we don't really get to see it close up until the final scenes with Ripley when we see it close up, a vision of phallic eldritch horrors that are somehow even worse than what we'd been imagining all that time? Right, think of that. Now imagine Alien was ten times as long and the alien was there the entire time. You can see it walking about. You can see it thinking. Ripley spends a cumulative total of two hours hiding under a table. The film wouldn't be quite as engaging, would it? The film wouldn't be quite as tense, would it?
And another thing, the stealth gameplay in this game is maddeningly vague and inconsistent. There are various lockers you can hide in dotted throughout the station. Logic and learned experience would suggest that if an enemy doesn't see you go into one of these they won't be able to find you. The alien can, though. I don't know if it can hear you opening the door, I don't know if it hears the automatic vent and door openings you can't help but trigger when you walk down corridors, but it continues to show up and find you in places where it feels like you shouldn't. The alien's AI is one of the most lauded aspects of this game - fully justifiably - but there are definitely times where you'll die and not understand why.
I mentioned the weapons and craftable materials. Why is it always crafting? Why can't I just find a thing and use it? The station is in the midst of civil war, there will be improvised weapons lying around. The irony is that the items you can craft end up largely redundant. The noisemaker is good because you can use it to distract whatever you're trying to avoid. Do we need a pipe bomb, a molotov, an EMP, a smoke bomb and a flashbang? Do we need three different upgraded versions of these? I don't think so. Do we need three different types of weapon, plus the flamethrower and stun baton? I realise some of my criticisms of this game are ultimately nitpicking from having played it three times but the craftable items really feel like trying to make a mechanic work because you feel you have to, rather than because it adds anything meaningful to the game. Give her a revolver, noisemakers and molotovs. Then there's a challenge, and items that are thematically consistent.
Another problem the game has, and arguably its biggest problem, is its complete lack of characterisation. A quote on the game's wikipedia article from a review sums it up well - Ripley (not that one) "exhibits little growth or personality, other than concern for her fellow humans and a desire not to die gruesomely". This is pretty much it. There are lots of other named characters you interact with over the course of the game and I don't know a thing about them. I have no reason to care about them, they're just voices in Ripley (not that one)'s ear. I think in a sense the game actually undermines itself by making any reference to the original film or characters. Aside from making you think of something else you probably have fond memories of which is done better, it makes it feel like Isolation is struggling to get out of Alien's shadow.
Nothing sums up the lack of a plot and poor characterisation quite like the moments where other characters hatch plots to trap or destroy the alien. This happens on three separate occasions. For the first time in my life I refused to do what a game told me to progress. There's a guy here who's rigged the nuclear reactor on his ship to blow, taking the ship, the station, all the people on the station and the alien with it? Well, he's right. "There are still people alive on the station!" says Ripley (not that one). Well I've met what's left on the station and they all want to kill you. This guy's right. You've found out the truth at the heart of the Alien series, The Corporations want to capture this creature to use it even though they don't understand it. They don't care about you. The alien will always win. Doing anything you can to eradicate all trace of it is the best option. But no, you're forced to stop it and this is only about the halfway point. Great.
It was about that halfway point I really started to give up on the game. Because the atmosphere and the core gameplay was so engaging I effectively reached the point where I resented the game more because I'd started off with such a positive impression, only for it to wildly outstay its welcome with repetition and unengaging characters and motivations. I think this is worse than a game just being outright bad consistently. A game whose strengths end up becoming its weaknesses without really changing is worse because you just feel let down.
My lasting impression of Alien: Isolation is probably similar to your impression of this review. Starts off clearly quite engaging, overstays its welcome, largely repeats itself constantly, lasts far too long, makes you never want to see it again. That all sounds about right to me.
