Alien: Isolation

Think back through you gaming "career" (for want of a better phrase). Through all the games you have played, the countless hours shooting, punching, jumping, collecting and running. For all those games, for all the time invested, I would be willing to bet there are only a handful of games that left a genuine impression on you. That went above being great games, to giving you moments you remember vividly, to the point of remembering where you were and who you were with the first time you encountered them. Alien Isolation, for me, is one of those games.

There are games I have enjoyed playing more (and the reasons why will become apparent over the course of this review), and a few games I will rate as a better game, but there are very few, if any, that I have felt have been such an immersive experience to play.

Alien Isolation was bordering on an ordeal to play, and I mean that in a good way. Never before have I felt so genuinely tense playing a game, felt like what I was doing was ACTUALLY a life and death scenario. The closest I can remember coming to that feeling is playing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. That said, there are similarities that make both games great.

One of the biggest selling points for RE3 was Nemesis. For the first time, we felt like we had an enemy where we were hunted. That at any time he could come for us, and that running wasn't good enough. We had to LOSE the guy, actually put enough distance between ourselves and him, not just a door. Of course, time as moved forward, and in the cold light of day we can see that as great as it was, and still is, it was still scripted, and there ARE ways, paths to take, to make sure you lose him.

But what if that hadn't been the case?

What if Nemesis had been able to show up at any time, in any place?

And what if Nemesis had been able to tear you limb from limb in one single second, and you couldn't out run him?

Enter the Xenomorph.

I was never a big fan of the original Alien movie. Not all bad, but I felt the film dragged on, the pacing was off. However, what they did RIGHT was represent the Xenomorph as an unstoppable killing machine. An ever present threat that they couldn't just empty clips into. This game captures that feeling hook, line, and sinker.

This is the first game where I have never felt "safe". There are NO safe rooms, like the classic chest and typewriter rooms in Resident Evil. If you can be in a room, so can than the Xenomorph, and your only hope is to hide when it is around. It is faster than you, it can not be fought, and it is CLEVER. Whatever Sega did, they produced an AI that definitely gives the impression it is thinking for itself. The Xenomorph does not take set paths, it does not have a selective memory, it learns, and any chance you choose to try get by it is not due to you learning a pattern (it has none), it is you evaluating your options and thinking "this is my best chance to make it as far as the next cupboard". As far as you are concerned, in the game world, that alien is alive and thinking for itself, and you have to be EXTREMELY savvy to survive.

This is the only thing I need to explain at length. The rest of the game is great. The script, the control scheme, the graphics (AMAZING), the other characters in the game, the puzzles, the combat, the whole lot would have made this a good game on their own. But...the alien. That Xenomorph deserves to go down as one of gaming's great antagonists now, not just film. Trying to do all the things you have to do in the game while dealing with it, it is an experience that will live with me forever. Even considering the fact it was genuinely stressful and I had to be in the right mood to play it, this is the sort of impression most games can only dream of making. This is when games start to become art.