Alien: Isolation

It may be synthetic, but it’s not stupid

THE ALIEN IS crouching on the desk we’re hiding behind. In classic movie fashion, we saw this sleek, black killing machine unfurl from its hiding place of pipes and wiring in the ceiling, that iconic, elongated head stretching down into the room above the Seventies computer console we’d been hacking. Amanda Ripley, the hero’s daughter who makes the briefest of cameos in the Aliens director’s cut, drops behind the table and presses up against it. We can hear the monster hissing above us. Its segmented, spiked tail drops over the side and lands next to us. Ripley recoils. And that’s when we notice her shoes.

Amanda Ripley is wearing white high-top trainers – the same trainers that the crew of the ill-fated Nostromo transport ship all wear in Ridley Scott’s first Alien film. It’s a tiny detail and the perfect example of the reverence with which the team at The Creative Assembly are treating the source material. Alien: Isolation isn’t a flashy, modern piece of sci-fi; there are no holograms or touchscreens, no heads-up display. What you get is Scott’s 1979 vision of the future: walls of blinking lights, bulky spacesuits and big CRT computer monitors that chirrup mechanically as they spout lines of indecipherable neon green code.

As you’d expect, not all of this aged tech is as reliable as you might like when being chased around a space station by a pitiless monster. In the demo segment we play, somewhere towards the middle of the game, the power’s down (isn’t it always?) and we need to find a console to power it back on. Ripley’s movements are classic survival horror: you can crouch to move slowly and quietly, walk normally to save time, or peg it full-tilt, clattering around the metal corridors like cutlery in a tumble dryer. There’s also a peek function that lets Ripley peer around corners, but unlike, say, Dishonored, you’re not magically invisible while using it. If you peek round a door frame and come face to face with a dribbling double set of jaws, it’s back to the last checkpoint with you.

That’s the biggest difference between Isolation and its stable of hit-and-miss Alien game predecessors: encounters with the alien are 100 per cent lethal. You’re not a colonial marine; you don’t have nukes, knives or sharp sticks. What you have is a motion tracker, for a rough guesstimation of where the alien might be, and your trainers, for doomed sprints towards safety when it sniffs you out hiding behind a cupboard.

We only died once in our playthrough, but what a death it was. While searching for an airlock door, the alien dropped in behind us in a corridor, forcing us into hiding as it slowly stalked around sniffing for us. Crouched behind a table, we moved painfully slowly in the opposite direction as it stepped round the sides, hunting for us – slow enough not to make noise, fast enough for it not to see us. The monster was touching distance away. It was horrible and it was brilliant.

Seemingly satisfied with its investigation, the alien stalked back up off the corridor, disappearing into the shadows. For the moment, it seemed we’d caught a reprieve. We scuttled over to the door. But there was a snag: we couldn’t find the control panel. There were so many blinking lights and dials that we couldn’t find the one to press. We stood up, went from one side of the door to the other, going back and forth in a panic trying to find the right switch. All in the full glow of the airlock door lights. The aien pinned Amanda to the floor and punched its extendable jaw into her head. No button prompt, no QTE. Game over, man, game over.

If this were a less ambitious game, that whole sequence would have been scripted. But beyond the alien’s appearance from the ceiling, our encounter with it was all the more terrifying precisely because it was organic: the alien was really searching for us, reacting to things it saw and heard in the environment. 30 minutes with the game left us on edge. If The Creative Assembly can maintain what we saw for the game’s full 12-hour story, we’ll be hiding in the ventilation ducts by the time it’s over. Rich Wordsworth