Alien: Isolation

Developer: The Creative Assembly | Released: 2014 | Genre: FPS, Horror

As a first person horror action/adventure, this game was quite true to the first movie and really managed to exude the same atmosphere. Especially the prefabs and corridors were an amazingly close call. In the beginning it also felt like a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, in part because of the ominous graffiti on the walls. And it was quite a looker. Lots of details, all high resolution textures, and a solid lighting style with small whiffs of smoke here and there.

The gameplay was mostly sneaking around, avoiding androids or the alien using various tools for opening doors and a bit of crafting for e.g. creating distracting bombs and health syringes. I could hide inside lockers or crawl through vents. Weapons were weak and ammunition sparse, and most of it would barely scare away the alien anyway. The androids in the game were also tough bullet sponges. Fighting one felt just as absurd as when Ripley fought Ash in the movie, just as it should be.

The levels were quite linear to begin with, but the later areas got bigger and with adjoining corridors. If the area felt particularly open with lots of options for moving around, chances were that the alien would be tagging along there as well. There was also a lot of backtracking, either to get back to a hub (such as the tram stations) or to open previously blocked doors with newly acquired hacking or cutting tools.

But it’s true what they all say – it was way too long (a whopping 19 missions) and sometimes relentless. I heard the rumors and prudently selected one of the lower difficulty levels, but still. There were actually a lot of levels where the alien wasn’t even present, but when it was, it felt like it was tethered to me. Sort of like if it could sense my aura and know not to go too far away.

Especially in a medical area this was so much over the top that I could barely concentrate on what I was actually supposed to do there.

The lower difficulty level eased up on this, but it was still quite noticeable. I bet having it leave completely for a few minutes at a time would have worked a lot better. That would have made me lower my guard, making the next sudden confrontation even more effective. Perhaps it wouldn’t even have had to leave physically. It could sort of go vacant in one of its roof vents, staring at a strikingly interesting vent wall bolt, then suddenly come to its senses and continue rumbling around loudly.

Minutia

I was in control of Amanda Ripley, daughter of that Ripley, and I immediately took notice of being able to see down her own legs. More first person games need to do that. Invisible limbs need to die, just like the mute protagonist. Sadly, she couldn’t jump. This was especially annoying in a hallway with a lot of rubble, most of which Ripley could easily have jumped or climbed over. Instead, she had to move a small vehicle and climb through a broken tube.

There were lots of Fallout 4 vibes in the beginning, actually. There were ghetto blasters with static to turn off, some of the hotkeys used for the mail terminals were almost as silly, and there was a similar loot menu on containers and bodies. It even had a nuisance right up Bethesda’s alley in the form of being forced to leave loot menus with a specific hotkey if you happened to be maxed out in an item type.

The crafting was the sort of doing it on the spot just by combining the component icons needed to create an item for the radial menu. No workbench needed here. I could find new blueprints for new stuff like e.g. noisemakers, smoke bombs, EMP mines, etc. Each time the item automatically added itself to the radial menu. It took me a little while to learn that pointing the mouse to a radial menu item chose it for first person use, while actually clicking the radial menu item meant crafting it.

There was a ton of small mini games. I really liked the one for hacking doors. A mouse cursor had to be moved around the edge of a screen for adjustment, and then a small number of pattern icons had to be selected within a countdown. Not too hard. Maybe the difficulty level added seconds there?

Some of the other mini games on static monitors weren’t always that logical, though. In a room with three monitors each with a mini game for establishing radio contact, one of them wanted me to tap direction keys in a timed manner. The timing wasn’t difficult at all, but the small icons with a clover of direction keys had dots inside three of these keys. At first that made me believe three keys had to be held down for each timed slot shown. After a minute of confuzzlement, it hit me that only the clear key in the icons indicated the direction, and then it was easy to complete. I’m not going to slap myself silly over that one, though. Having dabbled a bit in web development, I really believe those icons were misleading. Reversing the dots on the keys would have been much more logical.

It was also possible to rewire the electronics in various levels, like turning off lighting and cameras. This felt largely useless for a good while. Later, surveillance cameras could be turned off this way, but even then the rewiring panel was often right beneath the camera itself.

Also can’t say I was fond of discovering the old flashlight trope again with weak batteries running out fast, but it has now been part of a billion games since the dawn of dark corners, and it seems that game developers just can’t help loving it. For a while, it also seemed that it was bugged and wouldn’t allow me to pick up additional batteries even though the flashlight was almost depleted. Then quite a few missions later, I discovered that the batteries had to be fed into the flashlight by holding down its hotkey for a few seconds. Come on, why not just do that automatically as I pick them up?

Thank goodness for flares.

Other electronic doodads were e.g. clicking a big, beige map monitor to update the map, or the essential franchise motion tracker. The latter worked exactly as it should – audio clicks and big dots for movement on a crude monitor – but it had to be shown by holding down a key, after which the surroundings got slightly blurred. I would have preferred it to have been a fixed part of the HUD. Having to pull it out like that did make sense though, so I guess it’s just me dreaming for an easier time.

After my initial grunting and muttering about those manual save points – I would have preferred modern auto saving – they managed to annoy me even further by having some sort of wait timer after a recent use. At least it was a good call that the game had both a current and a previous save to load after dying.

And then there were those crazy key combinations for doing tool work, like removing the brace on a door using a big spanner. Hold down left and right mouse button simultaneously. Okay, done. Now hit a specific alphabetical key to finish it off. I get that the left and right mouse should match both hands gripping and the hotkey a direction for pushing or pulling, but it still felt unnecessarily convoluted. Why not just use one of those fast typing “close the circuit icon” hotkeys? Oh, wait, I get it. You want me to fumble this repeatedly while the alien is almost breathing down my neck.

One thing I actually thought worked well was the combination of melee and a firearm. Clicking left mouse button swings the spanner. Hold down right mouse button to aim the weapon and then the left mouse button as well to fire it. Just a shame that using e.g. a health syringe didn’t feel nearly as logical.

And I’m not entirely sure what to think of the expanded reload mechanic for firearms, either. A tap on the reload hotkey only adds one bullet. I have to hold down the reload button to max it out. But why would you ever want to reload just some bullets?

So suffice to say, the user interface was a hotchpotch of hits and misses. Not quite as bad as Fallout 4, but certainly a step in that direction.

The later areas opened up with adjoining areas and some backtracking wasn’t without problems either, especially when the area had several floors. The map wasn’t always clear on how to reach quest goals, and it wasn’t always cool trying to find an elevator what with the alien on an invisible leash. Sometimes I also goofed and chose the wrong elevator, then wondered about the quest goal right there on top of the same elevator. Oh, right. Wrong place.

Well, back and forth is twice the distance, as they say.

Without spoiling too much, there were of course also androids in the game, here lovingly called “Working Joes”. It was easy to spot them – typical movie android behavior with luminous eyes and rigid movements. They were surprisingly tough nuts, even when knowing what to expect from the movie. Melee attacks were almost useless without some form of distance effect to stagger them first, as they would just grab Ripley’s arm and hit back hard. Close up, which happened alarmingly often, gave me that fast typing “close the circuit icon” QTE hotkey. Gun shots? Bullet sponges. Fire? Couldn’t care less. One on fire even mentioned that they could resist up to 1210 degrees. (Fahrenheit or Celsius? I didn’t ask.)

And when they finally died, they made that disturbing gargle sound too like Ash did in the first movie.

Quite a weird temporary ceasefire came later in the game where I had to lure the alien into a different area. There were lots of androids here too, but for once they didn’t care about me and I could safely ignore them. The strange thing here is that the alien did the very same thing! I was hoping that I could have used some of these androids as a diversion for making it lag behind. So, why the sudden change of hostile heart, Mr. Alien? Was the smell of gears and wires too intense, perhaps?

Sneaking in general got better as soon as I got hold of that motion tracker, but I never thought it was awesome. Often it felt like more stealth tools were missing. The humans down a corridor might have been friendly and sometimes had to be checked out first. Oh, they weren’t? Pardon my fleeing! This seemed a bit random and made me wary of meeting new humans, but perhaps that was exactly what the developers wanted. Nevertheless it was sometimes necessary to check them out first because killing an ally or a civilian meant instant mission failure.

But worst was the wildly random AI of the alien. The way it rumbled around close by, popping out of roof holes, sniffing around, and then suddenly scurrying down a corridor, it could invalidate even the most impressive attempts at ghosting the level in an instant.

I thought Rock, Paper, Shotgun put it really well in a post from 2014 when they said:

Despite all of that praise, there are frustrations. Isolation is an unforgiving game. Unfair even. The alien will kill you, again and again and again. Progress can be slow and sometimes altering your tactics and using every tool at your disposal will seem pointless. Luck plays a role and passing a particular section can seem like an exercise in trial and error. The odds are stacked against young Ripley and even a fine understanding of the behaviours at play won’t be enough to prevent every single death.RPS

This game was incredibly faithful to the first movie and written well enough for it to be considered Alien 1½. It had a fantastic horror atmosphere with first class lighting and sound. But it was also too long, at times too repetitive (lots of ladders to climb) and the alien felt like it was on a tight leash. There was a lot of luck involved when trying to dodge the alien.

But if I were to time travel back one month and talk to myself, I would absolutely recommend I play it. Just prepare for some frustrations, and keep to the low difficulty level. And that mini game clover icon? Think of it in a reversed manner.