Throughout the whole game, Alien: Isolation remains subdued, unsettling, malicious. You made a good friend to me while you were outnumbered and torn. The horror, the slow-building dread, the knowledge that the idea of the Xenomorph is scarier than the physical manifestation of it, the constant threat of death, the bait or survival, and the balancing of cortisol and adrenaline. Film grain washes over the screen as you bait your breath and listen.īut it wasn’t just the retro-futuristic bakelite panels and buzzing fluorescent lights that Creative Assembly unpicked and repackaged – the studio also methodically laid out all the tropes of the first (best) Alien. Lens flare glints off your camera as you peek around corners. Post-processing effects were used to recreate the visual distortion you get in films from the late 70s, chromatic aberration is deployed deftly to make it look like you really are viewing this whole nightmare through an old CRT monitor. The game thoroughly ripped apart the first film to make the Space Station Sevastopol hum with authenticity. You don’t save and go off to make dinner without a second thought, no – you leave a bit of your cortex with Amanda Ripley. But in Alien: Isolation, as you take a deep breath and think about whether saving is going to push your back even harder against the cold, abandoned walls of the Sevastopol, you feel the game get its claws in you. In other games, you’d open a menu and hit a button, putting the game down for the night and letting your brain drift back to reality. Even saving your game makes you think about survival – makes you think about death. But I think it perfectly encapsulates what makes Alien: Isolation one of the best games, ever. You can lose hours of progress if you mess up your timing, if you gamble against Ripley’s ability to stay alive. Some may argue that this is appalling game design, making you gamble on whether or not you can actually save your game. We're now up here alone, terror on the intercom. The Switch version of the game is – dare I say it – nearly the definitive one. Its tail, tearing through your ribs, your lungs. Then – fuck – it’s coming up and out of your chest. The blinking light of the terminal closing in. Footsteps echoing through the deserted Sevastopol station. A glance at your motion tracker seems to suggest you’re safe. So you close your eyes, take a deep breath, and try to slink out of the little cupboard you’ve crammed yourself into as quietly as possible. Both in the game, and in your real life – you need to save, and get on with that article you’re supposed to be writing. And it’s waiting for you to make your move. But, moments ago, you heard the telltale ding of sinew on metal. You’re pressing the skin of your face to the inside of a locker, eyeing up that terminal, knowing it’s less than 20 feet away, probably. Especially when there’s something, somewhere nearby, lurking. Getting to a Registration Point and operating the key card-activated, payphone like system – it takes seconds. Saving your game shouldn’t be so stressful.
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