I thought I had achieved things. I thought I had overcome adversity and performed heroic, death-defying feats. But I know now that those adventures were a sham, a theme park version of danger and peril, my heroism puppeteered on invisible strings and my path to victory pre-paved. Because now I’ve experienced Alien: Isolation.
The Alien doesn’t give a fuck about how many of video games’ stupid lies you’ve believed. It couldn’t care less about your naïve, assumed privileges as Designated Protagonist. And if it had anything resembling relatable human emotions, it would laugh in the face of what you think you know about stealth and survival. I’ll let you into a little secret about Alien: Isolation. It isn’t a survival game at all. It’s a survival simulator. That’s very, very different to anything you’ve encountered before. Forget what you think you know. It won’t help here.
If Alien: Isolation can be summed up with any one word, then it’s ‘real’. Not ‘realistic’. Not ‘visually believable’. Not even ‘immersive’, that peak achievement of the best AAA games thus far. But flat-out, bona fide real, right through to its core, throughout everything it does.
Discovered in the death throes of a physical, social and economic collapse, Sevastapol station (resting place of the ill-fated Nostromo’s black box recorder) is a truly living ecosystem. And within it, you–even as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen–are not special, protagonist’s rights be damned. Very quickly, that notion will be driven into you as hard as a sledgehammer shot. Every one of Sevastapol’s humanoid denizens–from aggressively defensive looter to low-fi, bargain-bin android–is driven solely by the same dynamic, emergent AI instincts that have given the titular beast itself such warranted attention. Every encounter brings immense depth and spiralling, potentially deadly possibilities. Your enemies’ behaviour is always logical but endlessly unpredictable, driven by emergent interplay between character, environment and circumstance.
