I fell in love with the space station.
That, more than anything, explains what kept me chiseling away at Alien: Isolation, through its endless tiptoeing hours and interminable reloads, despite its preposterous premise: that Sigourney Weaver's fictional daughter would go looking for Mom, only to wind up doing battle with more insanity than all the nastiness in the films combined.
Alien: Isolation, available now for Windows and consoles, is just about the best thing I've played in 2014. I played at its highest difficulty and suffered accordingly, but boy was it worth it. I was entranced and frightened by Creative Assembly's haunted space-house filled with killer androids and hostile computer systems and the relentless, quicksilver Alien itself.
Here's a list of things Alien: Isolation excels at... and what it could have done better.
It has some of the best set pieces I've ever seen. Alien: Isolation resurfaces a bleaker vision of humanity's future, before sci-fi traded subversive storytelling for computer-generated hyperbole, well-behaved plots and one-liners. Ridley Scott's film was antithetical to Star Trekian notions that we'd someday cowboy across the universe in fashionable jump-wear from the decks of our U.S.S. Apple Stores. Scott and cinematographer Derek Vanlint's vision was of an unglamorous future, where blue-collar workers looked like blue-collar workers and space vessels were jungled sprawls that looked more like offshore drilling platforms.
Creative Assembly's extrapolative work on the Sevastopol space station in Isolation is an extraordinary feat of homage to both Scott's film and film designer Ron Cobb's interior artwork. Coiled tubing bulges and glistens in wall panels like exposed viscera, dingy polycarbonate walls and bulkheads flicker in the firelight from exploded piping, and steam eddies near grilles laid across harsh florescent lighting.
They've also been faithfully anachronistic---2137 wants to party like it's 1979. Incandescent bulbs dangle in cages along walkways, monochrome screens eep and boop and output ASCII characters and vector images, sprocket-fed documents with perforated edges and telltale bars of green-white hang from walls beside hand-scrawled logbooks, and actual cassette-playing boom boxes share office space with reel-to-reel audio recorders.
This is what comes of what I can only assume must have been an obsessive devotion to replicating the world the filmmakers built three and a half decades ago.
Form follows function. That was Alien designer Ron Cobb's maxim, and you see it throughout Isolation---a sense that the elaborate geometry comprising the Sevastopol's byways isn't mere ornamentation, and that there's logic behind each level's layout.
Some of it's common sense: Sevastopol is mostly dark (or at best, dim) because space stations this prodigious would probably have to conserve power. But you'll also spy piping with labels for power management or air filter control, systems that you can manipulate. Ventilation shafts and underfloor tunneling snake logically through station levels, simultaneously aeration systems and thoroughfares for subterfuge.
It's still chrome, but with dollops of function-related fidelity, making what could have been just a splashy special effects show into something that makes sense, too.
The soundscape will scare the bejesus out of you. You spend years taking sound design in games for granted, then something like Alien: Isolation comes along to remind you that what you can only hear, what's implied but not seen, is so much more frightening than buckets of giblet-filled blood or pop-out monsters that go boo.
Creative Assembly works its terrifying soundscape into a lather by nailing the sense of a commercial space station going about its dismal business: the chugging susurrus of air-handlers, the chittering boot-up sequences to some of the station's computer systems, the pops and twangs of stressed metal as you crawl through ductwork, the juddering whoosh of doors that thud closed and the skirling cacophony of some distant catastrophic breakdown as the station judders and thunders like a volcano on the verge.
And then you have the station's occupants: the ingeniously wrought horror-movie violins that crescendo as the Alien approaches your hiding spot and fade as it moves away, the startling hammer-thunk that signifies when a killer android has noticed you, the inhuman, indescribable noises the Alien makes that signal its shifting states of awareness, and the guttural way each android tells you to calm down as it's trying to choke you to death.
The Alien is frustrating in all the right ways. The Alien can't be killed, only avoided, and you're toast if it spots you, unless you have the presence of mind to lob a Molotov or blast a flamethrower to distract it. It clambers through ducts above and beside you, threatening every hiding spot, learning what you like to do and where you like to linger, forcing you to stay on the move, anticipate and palpitate quietly. Never in a game have I spent so much time gazing upward at ventilation openings, advancing on tenterhooks into a room or down a tunnel or through an agoraphobia-inducing warehouse. It's high stakes hide-and-seek, and your opponent gets smarter as time goes by.
Yes, it's easy to make a mistake and die instantly. Yes, you'll die a lot. And yes, you'll have moments where you've skipped a save and risked too much and have to replay chunks of busywork.
But that's why you have to learn to use you handheld motion tracker judiciously (the Alien can hear it if it gets close enough), and update your level map at special stations to glean alternate routes, and save even when "hostiles are nearby," and craft items like noisemakers to lure the Alien away momentarily, and study the Rewire system's power-rejiggering features so you can attempt to place strategic blocks between you and your xenomorphic pursuer.
And it's also why the developers give you needed breaks from Alien-eluding---a significant one during the game's final third---to grapple with other threats, like human survivors (some hostile, some not), crazed androids and the disintegrating, puzzle-riddled station itself.
The San Cristobal Medical Facility sequence. Your first encounter with the Alien is scary but scripted. The San Cristobal medical area around chapter five is where the game finally lets you off the leash to test drive the A.I. sandbox. Of course, it also lets the Alien off its leash. Figuring out how to evade the game's un-killable Shiva during this sequence, and realizing just how tricky that's going to be for the rest of the game, ranks among the tensest two or three hours I've experienced in a video game since the original System Shock.
I died like a lemming time-looped back to life, but each time I must've looked like someone who'd jumped from an airplane, elated, heart-racing, grinning ear-to-ear, the only thought ponging through my brainpan: Let's do that again!
The way it cleverly conditions your response to everything. Is that the Alien's elongated head or a long curving pipe? Is that water dripping from the ceiling or acid drooling from the Alien perched in a vent? You've heard people talk about seeing things. You will see things everywhere once the game gets its hooks into your fight-or-flight center.
Alien: Isolation does a lot of things right. Here are the things it whiffed.
You’re another Ripley thwarting another alien infestation. It took Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley two films before she ever squared off with a handful of Aliens, but her daughter ends up taking on an army of them? It's ridiculous, a narrative cheat that's trying to shoehorn emotional resonance into a story that doesn’t need it. There's very little sense of the Amanda-Ellen relationship, and the payoff, if you can call it that, feels hurried and a little forced. It’s wonderful playing as a strong, clever, self-reliant woman, and a testament to the game and character that I stopped caring Amanda was Ellen’s daughter an hour or two in, but surely such traits extend beyond the Ripley gene pool.
You can't shift your attention the way a normal person would. If you're rifling through a computer terminal's entries or saving at a save station and the Alien drops from the ceiling a dozen feet over, you're pretty much screwed. In some instances the game's deliberate nature is smart, like the way it forces you to separately insert each bullet into your revolver when you reload. But in others it doesn't make sense: If I'm standing in front of a screen casually perusing someone's email or punching a card in a box on a wall, it shouldn't take three or four seconds for me to jump away from that.
The way one of the major goalposts moves. At one point you're tasked with trapping the Alien. But you're clearly only halfway through the game, and so it's a given you're not going to succeed, even as you go through the motions knowing full well (as a player) where the outcome is headed. It's a missed story opportunity. Based on what happens shortly thereafter anyway, there's no reason the game couldn't have rewarded your hard work, then used the twist to keep the plot cooking.
The sometimes-silly level contrivances. You're gazing over a barricade just a few feet high. You're clearly agile enough to climb over it (only toddlers or the infirm wouldn't be). But the game needs to scare or hurt you for whatever reason, so you're forced down pain-filled routes with sparking electric cables or jets of flame.
The Rewire system could have been so much better. Imagine you've divvied floors in a haunted house into sections with interdependent control systems, then you let a killer loose (like Cabin in the Woods!). Now you sprinkle each floor with two or three master control panels that let the killer's quarry manipulate aspects of the house: lighting, security cameras, air quality, locked doors and so forth.
A recipe for fun! But then you leave the house almost empty, and thus make the benefits of turning this or that item on or off difficult to understand, and fiddling with the system only produces fractional benefits anyway.
Alien: Isolation's Rewire system should have been a puzzle game inside a survival horror maze that might have turned Sevastopol into a meta-toy you could ply to mess with the A.I. Instead, it's a box you occasionally check to unlock some pathway to complete whatever mission objective, the skin of a fantastic idea without the muscle or bone.
And that's about it. "At its most fundamental level, Alien is a movie about things that can jump out of the dark and kill you," wrote film critic Roger Ebert, revisiting the film in 2003. "One of [its] great strengths...is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits." It's as if Ebert anticipated Alien: Isolation, only in Creative Assembly's version, you're both instigator and victim.
