It's when the Alien shows up that the game finds its real pulse. You'll trigger audio diaries, hack locks, find keycards - it's standard first-person exploration stuff, albeit in an unusually compelling environment. This is a game during which you'll spend a lot of time frozen in fear, hiding from certain death - but you're just as likely to find yourself stopped in your tracks to admire the scenery.Īs gorgeous as it is, there's nothing you'll do here that hasn't been done before. The lighting is superb, and the moments when a rare window offers a view of the vacuum outside are breathtaking. This is a place that feels lived in, and the visuals rise to the challenge brilliantly. One of the fun features is the use of motion sensing to let you peek out of cover, another the use of audio recognition to allow the Alien to 'hear' any noises you make in real life. You get to see the ruins of every aspect of life on a frontier station, written so deftly into the scenery that the decision to spell out Sevastopol's desperation in gaudy fake-sounding graffiti slogans feels like overkill. Real thought has gone into the functionality of the station, the location of the different sectors and how they relate to one another. It's a dead environment, but one that is alive with detail. Much of the game's pathos comes from the log entries left by ordinary inhabitants, crushed by economics long before they were dragged away by the Alien. What was supposed to be a shining beacon of an outpost turns out to be a dead end, about to be shut down, its bars, stores and living quarters abandoned as galactic austerity bites. The Sevastopol is similarly cheap and shabby.
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Its top products are synthetic workers, but far from looking like Ian Holm or Lance Henriksen, the "Working Joes" are blank-faced creeps with white rubber skin and hollow voices. The Sevastopol, you see, is owned by Seegson, a technology company that is basically the Lidl to Weyland Yutani's Waitrose.
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Just as the 1979 movie pulsed with a bitter undercurrent of class resentment, so Isolation presents us with a corporate future that feels weary, exhausted and broken in ways that are all too familiar. This is where Creative Assembly shows that it really understands the world it has inherited. You see evidence of its gory handiwork, but mostly the opening of the game is spent immersing you in the downfall of Sevastopol, already well under way before a xenomorph found its way on board. Much like Scott's movie, this is a slow burn of a game, keeping its monster out of the picture for a long time. There's a very subtle Blade Runner easter egg hidden in the game, for those who want extra movie geekery. When word comes in that a salvage vessel has found the flight recorder from the Nostromo, she's offered the chance to join the crew, as an engineer but also as a daughter looking for closure. Set 15 years after the Nostromo was lost, Amanda is now a young adult, a brash engineer whose abandonment issues have left her with impregnable emotional defences. It's a decision that made me roll my eyes at first - too many sci-fi franchises end up restricting their universes to ever smaller iterations, rather than let go of established characters - but the way it's handled here makes perfect sense. You're playing as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Sigourney Weaver's iconic big-screen heroine.
This is a game of details, where thick atmosphere adds muscle to simple gameplay ideas, and where the creaking, moribund space station Sevastopol, all ruined walkways and steam-hissing passages, is arguably a more important character than any of the slightly stiff supporting players you'll encounter along the way. I've been chasing that initial high ever since - and from the moment it opens with a distorted, crackling rendition of the 20th Century Fox fanfare that looks like it could have come from the very same VHS tape, Creative Assembly's Alien: Isolation is the closest I've come to recapturing that same mix of cloying dread and intense vulnerability.
Around the time the creature's pneumatic jaw slammed into the skull of Yaphet Kotto's Parker and you totally saw bits of his brain, I caved in, faked a need to be somewhere else and fled into the suburban sunshine to walk off my jitters. It was the first proper horror movie I'd seen, outside of cheap black-and-white 1950s monster movies, and quite frankly it scared the piss out of me. A schoolfriend had taped it off the telly, and one summer holiday afternoon we all gathered in his living room to watch this forbidden fruit, brought to us by the magic of a Memorex E-180. I was nine years old when I first saw Ridley Scott's Alien.
A bold approach to the licensed game pays off in this inventive slice of deep space terror.
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