Alien is one of my all-time favorite movies. Its sequel, Aliens, is fantastic, too, due to its way of taking the tension from the first film and exploding it on the silver screen through the introduction of Marines, pulse rifles, and hordes of aliens looking to either puncture their skulls, or remove them for the purpose of placing them in front of one of those nasty-looking eggs with an equally nasty surprise inside.
But the thing I always liked about the first film, and why it will always remain nearer and dearer to my horror-loving heart than its loud and vociferous sibling, is the way in which it depicts ordinary people faced with a seemingly invincible, powerful foe that could be hiding anywhere on their ship. They’re not soldiers. They’re not police. There are no military or paramilitary backgrounds. They are working class average joes who are sick and tired of being cooped up with each other in the middle of space, which is why they are none too happy when their ship is diverted to a certain planet by their corporation.
Unsurprisingly, Aliens has served as the inspiration for several shooters, namely the Aliens Vs. Predator series (which was awesome until it made the jump to consoles) and the reviled Aliens: Colonial Marines, which I downloaded from Steam for $4.99 and immediately uninstalled after roughly an hour of dealing with its boring level design and hopelessly stupid AI. This is why I became very, very excited when I heard that Sega and Creative Assembly, the developer best known for the Total War series of strategy games, were creating a survival horror game based on the first film of the franchise.
Here’s the premise (some movie spoilers if you haven’t seen the original film): Alien: Isolation is set 15 years after the events of the first film, in which Ellen Ripley has successfully blasted the alien out into space after it hid aboard the ship she used to make her getaway from the Nostromo. It focuses on her daughter, Amanda, who works for the same corporation and is seeking answers behind the disappearance of her mother. She sets out for a space station known as Sevastopol after learning that the flight recorder from the Nostromo has been recovered, and upon arriving, discovers that the space station is damaged for reasons yet to be made clear, the crew is terrified and trying to survive, and that the station is now being stalked by a similar creature as the one that made it aboard the Nostromo 15 years earlier.
Here’s what I like about the game. Like the original film, it focuses on a group of engineers and scientists working for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Again, not soldiers or former police officers and the like. It’s from a first-person perspective, and you have no weapons with which to defend yourself. It’s been indicated in gameplay breakdowns and developer diaries released by the team at Creative Assembly that you will be able to pick up supplies and items that you can use to craft distractions and/or traps for the alien so you can get away. Other than that (and hopefully the flamethrower from the original film), you are defenseless, and have to rely on your wits, your senses, and the bulky CRT motion detector that you will be carrying around with you in order to keep from being discovered and killed by the single xenomorph stalking the halls of the station.
The depiction of the alien in this game is another aspect of the game that I’m excited about. Further developer diaries from Creative Assembly indicate that the AI that drives the alien is completely unscripted, which means that it’s unpredictable and can show up at any point in the game. If it works the way I’m hoping it will, this will mean tons of replay value, since encounters with the alien can potentially last up to half an hour or more. While I love games like Resident Evil and Dead Space, I played them so many times that the scripted encounters with the monsters became less scary since I knew what was coming. With Alien: Isolation, that hopefully won’t be case.
I also love the world that Creative Assembly has created in the game. If there was anything that the game BioShock accomplished, it was underscore the importance of a living, breathing, vibrant world that carried its own ecology and economy that its NPC denizens adhered to. In Alien: Isolation, they have gone out of their way to adhere to the original vision of the 1979 film – that is, no flat screens or the sort of technology we are used to today. Creative Assembly effectively replicated the bulky, CRT technology and aesthetics seen in the original film. This is something that I wish had been done in Prometheus, which, despite its producers’ assurances to the contrary, was a prequel to Alien, included futuristic technology such as holograms and the like. I’m glad that Creative Assembly has ignored the technology we are used to and have instead focused on a retro futuristic feel that replicates the set pieces for the original film.
Now…here are some of my worries, now that I’ve blathered on regarding what I’m excited about.
There are two causes for concern – the kind of interaction you will have with the other NPCs populating the station, and how well sneaking through darkened corridors of a derelict space station is going to translate into a 10-15 hour experience. The latter is something that others have expressed concern about as well, and what I’m hoping is that the encounters with NPCs between the bouts of sneaking will be just as meaningful as the undoubtedly terrifying encounters players will have with the alien. It has been indicated that the other NPCs on the station will not have the protagonist’s best interests at heart, since they are terrified and trying to stay alive on their own terms. There’s a potential here for a dynamic regarding who you can count as your allies and as your enemies, especially since, with regard to the latter category, there is a rival corporation other than Weyland-Yutani in play here. What they have to do with this present situation is unclear at this point, but it’s entirely possible that we’re going to have rival corporations fighting over who gets to control the alien and attempt to exploit it for their nefarious purposes.
In any case, we will find out on October 7th of this year, which is when Alien: Isolation debuts. I, for one, have high hopes for this game, since it so effectively replicates the original film while standing on its own two feet in terms of a unique storyline and gameplay reflecting games such as Amnesia or Outlast. I just hope that the storyline and the encounters with the other people on the station will be just as meaningful as the encounters with the alien.
For further info, here’s some links to the aforementioned developer diaries and gameplay breakdowns.
The Eclectic Post-Dispatch 