Backlog: Alien Isolation

The Ripley family just has hell of luck with Weyland-Tutani and aliens. They just seem to be magnetized to each other. 

I started Alien Isolation in 2017. I liked the idea of a slow moving, stealth focused game, rather than a run and gun. 

Creative Assembly nailed the aesthetic of that 1970s retro-future, clean white walls with random buttons and tape drives everywhere. All the computers are that fake DOS/Apple 2 interface. And every... single....door... is automatic. (the absolute height of future technology). 

My favorite parts of Alien Isolation were the quiet parts where exploration and puzzle solving were at the forefront. Wandering the space station was ... well there's no other way to say it... just so cool. 

There are three main enemies in the game, humans who have already degraded to clan warfare, androids who for some story reason are programmed to kill on site, and the titular alien. 

The fights with humans are mostly frustrating. Again, this is a game where you are encouraged to find a quiet way around. So you can't really fault the game when you mess up and bring a room of humans onto you. 

The gun play is a little too loose to win a gun fight. You're best bet to sprint the hell out of the room or duck into a vent until the humans get bored. 

The androids are both the most interesting enemy and the most terrifying. You see their glowing eyes as they murmur something about following them for best safety protocol before choking you. 

Androids require EMP mines or grenades to handle in groups. It's a combination of stunning them and then beating their head in with your wrench. When you need quick crowd control, the shotgun and flame thrower are your friends. 

And then the alien. The reveal is one of the better moments of the game. You know he's in there somewhere, hell the title of the game says so. But you spend hours in a desolate space station before he first shows up. And when he does, he's an imposing force. You forget it's a game and hold your breath in real life. 

In the early levels, it's an intense game of cat and mouse. You're still trying to figure out what makes the alien tick. What makes it pop out of the vents. You never know if it's truly safe to leave your hiding spot. 

Then like with most of these cool systems, you soon find out how it works. The alien does randomly patrol, only really reacting to loud noises (running, gunning). The randomly patrolling continues to make it hard (and sometimes frustrating) to know when you can move or hit the button you need to. 

And then you realize there's no escaping the alien when it's triggered. The alien doesn't just roam the floor you're on, taking out other humans or androids. No, the alien is tethered to you, so you can never truly outsmart it. 

I saw a thread that summed up how the alien works. It has two brains, one of which keeps track of your location and reports to the other brain, the one with all the movement and attacks, where to head. 

Like all alien franchise related media, someone in charge of making money gets the idea that "more aliens = more money." This worked exactly once, Alien to Aliens. 

Once there's many aliens running around and you can murder them all with machine guns and flamethrowers, they lose some of their teeth. Unfortunately, this game doesn't escape that either. Well worn territory, you eventually find a nest, piss off a ton of aliens, who then have free reign of the space station.