Alien: Isolation (PC Game Review)
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| Released on October 6, 2014 by Sega, and developed by Creative Assembly, Alien: Isolation features the horrific adventures of Amanda Ripley aboard the alien-infested Sevastopol space station |
1979's Alien is in the upper pantheon of my favorite films, even higher than the much heralded 1986 sequel, Aliens. However, video game developers have understandably favored the flavor of the action-oriented Aliens over the slow burn cosmic and gothic horror of the original 1979 film. In 2014, Sega and Creative Assembly set out to change that, releasing Alien: Isolation, a game that focuses on terror and survival horror over action. The game features Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Alien protagonist, Ellen Ripley, as she accepts an invite to journey out to a far-flung space station that apparently holds the flight recorder from her mother's ship, 15 years after Ellen went missing in deep space. Unfortunately, Amanda and the small crew of her ship arrive to find the space station, the Seegson Corporation owned Sevastopol, wrecked. After a spacewalk to the station ends in disaster, Amanda finds herself alone on the Sevastopol...or is she? The station's large battalion of service androids have gone feral, the Sevastopol's remaining crew have formed violent factions, and worst of all, there's something stalking and slaughtering any human it encounters...an alien life form whose structural perfection is only matched by its hostility.
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| Back to Zeta Reticuli... |
Even only a few minutes of Alien: Isolation gameplay reveals the excellence of its visual design. The production team decided that instead of designing the world of 2137 as the future of our current world, they would design it based around the late 1970's artistic interpretation of the future found in the Alien film. The retro-futurism aesthetic of the film is fully and beautifully realized here, as every room, spacecraft, and piece of technology is designed as something that could have been made as a special effect with late 70's technology. The game's lighting effects are gorgeous, the alien(s?) look movie accurate, and overall, this game scratches a major itch for me, essentially presenting one of my favorite overall aesthetic visions in about as great a fashion as possible.
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| Windows into space are my happy place |
The sound design is equally excellent. Alien: Isolation begs to be played with headphones. Pipes hiss, broken electronics spark, functional electronics beep, the broken down space station creaks and shudders, the alien hisses and roars, and it all sounds magnificent. This incredibly immersive design is augmented by a wonderfully cinematic soundtrack, which takes strains of Jerry Goldsmith's score for the 1979 film, introduces some nice twists and distortions, and even adds some new beautifully orchestrated pieces during the action-heavy sequences. Overall, the production package here is nearly perfect, except when it comes to one thing: Amanda Ripley herself.
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| The problem is certainly not the alien! |
Ellen Ripley is one of the greatest characters in cinema, often regarded as the greatest female action hero, though there's a lot more to her than that. On the 90s Movies Podcast, I discussed Ripley's philosophical arc through the original three Alien films (even the divisive third one), arguing that her arc in totality can be summed up as "Ripley vs. Nihilism," with the aliens acting as Nihilism's ultimate expression. However, Isolation feels like the game designers only took to heart that fact that Ellen Ripley is assertive and a bit of a hardass, or at least those are the only characteristics they give Ripley's daughter, Amanda. However, the developers have overlooked Ripley's warmth, which the first film highlights through Ripley's relationship with the ship's cat (Not only does she speak affectionately to him, but she risks her life multiple times for the little guy!), and the second film brings to ultimate fruition by positing Ellen as the uber-mother, who fiercely protects her surrogate daughter. Newt. The Ellen Ripley in that second film is unfrozen from her deep space cryo-sleep after Amanda has passed away (many years after the events of Isolation take place), but she is a loving guardian for Newt, whether she's cradling her to help her sleep, or climbing into a mech to bash an alien threat's head in. Alien 3 continues displaying Ripley's warmth through her romantic relationship with the Clemens character, and her role as essentially spiritual acolyte to the Dillon character, who revives Ripley's sense of purpose after she loses everything she holds dear. Amanda possesses NONE of this warmth, and is generally reduced to an angry, abrasive person who generally communicates through aggressive grunts and yelling.
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| She's got all the charm of the inside of the alien's second jaw. Also, the death animations in this game have to be scariest in any game! |
The production does little favors to elevate Amanda's shallow characterization. Visually, she is unattractive, and I don't mean this in a "Why isn't she hot?!" skeevy way, but in a simple, "It either feels like the designers went out of their way to make this character look unappealing or they simply failed in the character design" way. Worst of all, Amanda has absolutely no resemblance to her mother, which feels especially strange considering that original Ellen Ripley actress, Sigourney Weaver, lent her voice acting talents to this game. In that department, Amanda is again a failure, as her voice actress injects all of the lines with an air of disdain and distant coldness. Again, the writing does the character no favors, and while her basic motivation of wanting to find out what happened to her mother is relatable, the game does the absolute minimum to show what Amanda's connection to her mother is like, without even a single line of dialogue featuring Amanda talking about Ellen. The developers could have had Amanda recall a childhood memory or two to give even the faintest bit of background, but it almost feels like they are terrified that humanizing Amanda in the least will give her the faintest trace of vulnerability...vulnerability that multiple filmmakers and Weaver herself had absolutely no issue injecting into Ellen Ripley to make her relatable, empathetic, and ICONIC. This lack of Amanda's even basic human relatability handicaps the game's emotional impact, and feels like an early prototype for several notable and equally unrelatable female characters in the Sci Fi genre throughout the rest of the 2010s and on into the 2020s.
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| A trope that's become as tiresome and predictable as a drinking bird. Also, Alien fans, look, a drinking bird! |
Thankfully, Amanda isn't talking most of the time, and the player is seeing things through the eyes of her first-person perspective the majority of the time, and not watching her. The rest of the game and gameplay is so immersive, it's easy to forget Amanda and feel like you are the one trapped on the disintegrating space station far out in deep space, being hunted down by a bloodthirsty, incomprehensible alien. It might be arguable that's what the developers were going for by the hollow characterization, but I don't think giving Amanda a background and a more human personality would have ruined the immersion factor.
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| The worst kind of stalker |
Alien: Isolation plays like a hybrid of a modern first-person shooter and a stealth game, leaning far more heavily into the latter. The essential gameplay loop is that Amanda must complete a task, i.e. getting across a section of the space station to reach and turn on a generator, while avoiding the alien, along with the paranoid, heavily armed station survivors, and the deranged and malfunctioning Seegson Corporation androids, after which she'll have to complete another similar task, on her quest to find her mother's flight data, before getting the hell off the Sevastopol. While the story around Amanda and the alien here doesn't add much to the franchise, everything involving the Seegson Corporation's incompetence and cultural rot is highly amusing. Turns out Sevastopol was the headquarters for Seegson's android manufacturing, marketing, and selling enterprise. Seegson, knowing they could not compete with the mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani's lifelike, highly intelligent droids, developed a cheap, unpredictable, and terrifying looking competitor called the "Working Joe." The Working Joe's are hulking, pale-skinned, glowing red-eyed, bald monstrosities that are supposed to help people complete basic tasks, but which malfunction to keep humans safe from danger by killing them before something else can. Throughout the game, the player comes across computer consoles, where e-mails lay out the game's lore and story, as Seegson employees begin to realize that the enterprise is failing, that they aren't going to be selling any of the Working Joes, and that Seegson is not only going to fire everyone, but force them to take out loans with the company just to pay for transportation to get off of Sevastopol Station. IOf course, that's if the employees survive more than just the Working Joes...because when Weyland-Yutani finds out there's an alien on the station, they immediately initiate a corporate buyout, lock down the station, and issue the edict that the ravenous, murdering alien must not be harmed. It's hilariously incisive cultural commentary that outshines the main storyline, which is essentially just the rehashed story of the first Alien film, but with far more victims and in a much larger vessel, at least up until the final act, when the gravity of the situation expands and...well, I don't want to spoil it, but lets just say the environment gets a lot more squishy and mucus-filled.
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| Oh no, it's that damn ship again! |
Like many games of this ilk from the 2010s onward, crafting is a major part of the gameplay. The player will find many, many components throughout the station with which to build numerous important tools like medical kits, EMP mines (to knock out the pesky droids), pipe bombs (to blow up the pesky droids and volatile humans), noise makers (to trick enemies), Molotovs, and many more. Each tool has a high component crossover with several others, meaning the player can choose what they'd like to make at their discretion, playing through the game with whatever tools they'd rather utilize. The player will also find numerous weapons and completed tools (i.e. a blowtorch) that coincide with story moments, as the storyline here is linear. The earlier weapons like a pistol and shotgun are handy against dangerous humans and (less effectively) the droids, though they not only do no damage to the alien, but call its attention to you and your human enemies if one of you fire when the alien is nearby. Of course, if the player hides while their human enemies are firing weapons, they are treated to a vent-framed view of the alien slaughtering those enemies. As ammo is scarce, there's also a melee wrench the player can use infinitely, which is effective in silently bludgeoning humans, as well as at least helping the player get some distance from the androids...or sometimes even to beat them to death too, if they've been stunned with another tool, like the EMP. Generally, weapons are used sparingly, as sneaking around is often the best option...and when that alien is around, the player will most certainly want to be sneaking around. The alien in this game might just be the most terrifying foe in any game.
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| Why can't you just leave me alone?! |
For the majority of Alien: Isolation, if the alien sees the player, the player is dead. Every attack by the alien is a one-shot kill. The player finds a motion detector early in the game, which is helpful in notifying both how close the alien is, as well as its cardinal location. However, use the motion dectector when the alien is too close, and it will hear the nerve-wracking beeps caused by its own approach. There are numerous vents and lockers and other areas where the player can hide when the alien nears, but if it senses the player is in a locker, they'll have to press a button to back up into it as far as possible and another to hold Amanda's breath, which is, obviously, finite. If there's a large obstruction blocking the alien's line of sight, like a tall counter, and the alien hasn't noticed the player yet, they can crouch down and creep away. With this enemy who has highly attuned senses, who can drop down from an air vent at any moment, constantly hunting the player, Isolation is a tense experience to put things lightly. The developers take huge advantage of the soundscape here too, as crashing noises can be the station falling apart, or the alien rampaging around in the next room...even the sound of Amanda breathing (her breath becomes more rapid when the alien nears) makes the suspense nearly unbearable. However, I will say that the 20 hour game becomes a bit tedious about 10 hours in, when it feels like the alien is just sitting atop your location, and it becomes less an object to fear than an all out nuisance. The fact that part of its AI is randomized also means that from time to time, the alien will hyper focus on a certain room or area, and if it's the one you're in, you might as well just jump out and let the alien kill you so that you can start back at the save point. Thankfully, save points, in the glorious form of a retro emergency phone set, are plentiful. However, save points or not, that stretch of the game, just past the midpoint, did tempt me to quit in frustration.
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| My space window obsession can only keep me going for so long |
Thankfully, I did not quit, as just past that frustrating point in the game, when the alien is starting to lose its novelty, the player is given a flamethrower, and the entire complexion of Alien: Isolation changes. While the flamethrower has limited fuel, and there are limited fuel tanks scattered throughout the game, it is, FINALLY, a weapon that can temporarily chase away the alien. Once that happens, anytime the alien is becoming a nuisance, if the player has wisely rationed their fuel, they can flame the alien away. At the same time, just as Isolation starts to wring out the last ounce of visual enjoyment from the retro space station, the development team finds some original ways to change up the environment. They also present some absolutely epic situations, and even a few moments where the game goes full action/first-person shooter mode. Near the end, the game developers even find new ways to make the original concept tense and scary again, and there are even late game elements that touch upon some of the nihilistic themes of the film, as well.
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| The Working Joes' meaningless adherence to eliminating you is almost as nihilistic as the alien |
Overall, as a huge fan of Alien, I very much enjoyed Alien: Isolation. The game does have some major flaws, including a weak main character, as well as a bland midsection that drags and tempts the player to move on to something else. Isolation works best as a stressful, intense experience, something that is hard to maintain over a long period of time, so it would probably work better with about 1/4 of the 20-hour game-time shaved away. More depth for Amanda would also make her a more relatable character. With that said, the majority of the Alien: Isolation experience not only works, but at least on an aesthetic, atmospheric, mood-setting, and sometime thematic level, does the 1979 film justice. There's even some humor, particularly coming from the Joes, who eventually take over a portion of the station, pointlessly continuing their routines, while spouting off corporate platitudes and catchphrases like, "You always know a Working Joe." It's those quirks that not only help Isolation live up to its prestigious heritage, but stand out as its own unique experience.
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