Aliens – note the s – has been a staple of interactive entertainment for decades. In addition to seeding the space marine concept, it personally influenced a series of battles against the Predator before self-destructing with 2013’s Aliens: Colonial Marines. Alien, however, operates under the hushed guise of tension and restraint. Isolation translates this sentiment with a subscription to the dormant survival-horror movement, emphasizing a slower and contemplative style of play over boundless spectacle and action. Despite shared appreciation for their monstrous antagonist, Alien and Aliens brandish different and divisive interpretations of horror.
Alien Isolation’s fiction is also its invitation. Fifteen years after the end of Alien, Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley, sets out on a course to discover what happened to her mother. As intriguing as the premise may be, it’s better served as creative justification for Isolation to unload impassioned monuments to Alien’s retro/future aesthetic. Looking at it now, Alien’s vision of the future is kind of a weird place; cathode-ray monitors line control rooms, cassette-tape powered boombox’s are omnipresent, and the puffy-white architecture surrounding the crew’s quarters is triumphantly kitschy. It’s makes for a unique and recognizable style, and it works because Isolation never wavers in its commitment to conformity. It may be equally effective if it were simply a virtual museum on Alien-inspired engineering.
Equally impressive are the lengths at which Isolation takes creative liberty with the Alien universe. The flight recorder of Ellen Ripley’s ship, Nostromo, is being held aboard a space station called Sevastopol, itself owned by the Seegson Corporation. The perpetually insidious Weyland-Yutani company sends a crew, including Amanda Ripley, out to retrieve data that may provide a path to the coveted xenomorph. In the Seegson Corporation, Isolation creates a kind of dirt bag, low-rent Weyland-Yutani that seems twice as trashy and doubly innocent. The Sevastopol’s APOLLO A.I. even controls a series of noticeably inferior androids, called Working Joes, which operate some of the more casual duties around the station. Even though the Sevastopol appears to have suffered some kind of irreparable catastrophe before Amanda and her crew arrived, it still bleeds the air of indulgence from Isolation’s art and design teams going crazy with Alien’s aesthetic. Retail space, science labs, crew lounges, and ship command centers all feel the pulse from Alien’s beating heart.
Isolation’s slavish faith to Alien also carries the burden of obeying tropes specific to its calling. Certain references are welcomed; it’s haunting to see a Working Joe run-in-place like Ash or hear “the company” referenced with casual indifference. Other calling cards feel played for the sake of inclusion. Did Isolation need a scene where a character interfaces with APOLLO the same way Dallas talks to MU-TH-UR? Is a flamethrower really the Excalibur of self-defense? Does Amanda need to suffer the same revelatory character arc as her mother? Isolation is at its best when it uses Alien’s design as a launchpad for its own ideas, not a model with which to tell another version of the same story. In fairness, indulgences within the fiction dominate most of Isolation’s narrative, but frequency of unwelcome callbacks leave a lasting impact.
What begins as a simple evidence collecting mission spirals out of control, leading Amanda and a handful of survivors across the vast stretches of Sevastopol. This quickly breaks off into Isolation’s signature attraction; Amanda and a xenomorph in constant pursuit of her existence. Within hours of playing Isolation certain sounds begin to impress their terror upon the mind of the player. Scrambling in air-vents overhead, the unmistakable noise of something dropping out of a ventilation shaft, and the trademark screech of a charging Xenomorph signify unmistakable doom. Amanda cannot kill the xenomorph; retreats into storage lockers or underneath desks being her only form of defense. Isolation’s selected difficulty level determines how ruthless the xenomorph can be in pursuit of Amanda, but it’s not unfair to speculate a significant portion of Isolation can be spent hiding in cover and waiting for the dreaded thing to disappear.
Frustration and disappointment arrive with the xenomorph’s distinct lack of logic and predictability. It can be distracted with noisemakers, frightened away with a flamethrower, and send asunder when in the presence of other humans. These are neat opportunities to play with Isolation’s AI, but fail to stand up to repeated tests of interactive wherewithal. It’s entirely possible to scare the xenomorph away, turn around to input a code to a door, and then find Amanda pierced through the stomach by the xeno’s whip-sword tail. Certain tells, like the salival goop dripping out of an overhead vent or readings from Amanda’s incredibly useful motion tracker aim to prevent this, but Isolation’s middle chapters are punctuated with the player constantly repeating specific sequences. What starts as calculated and engaging, upon repeating it for the tenth time, quickly turns routine and disappointing. When this happens Isolation isn’t scary, it’s a process.
These sequences are a shame because when Isolation is on, it’s really on. I found the lack of traditional checkpointing – Isolation only saves in between its hour-long chapters, leaving its sparse manual save stations as its only hard checks – to be essential in creating a calamitous atmosphere. Without it I wouldn’t have experienced the desperation of creeping down a derelict hallway with my motion-tracker haphazardly accepting the dual role of both shield and anchor. It’s a tool, not a self-defense mechanism, but it’s all I had to combat the presence of an indestructible killing machine. The motion tracker’s also wildly integrated into Amanda’s point of view, blurring out the background and ensuring she can’t keep as tight of a grasp on the physical world. It’s telling when a game’s most useful mechanic isn’t a direct line of offense, but rather a spurring indicator of incoming danger.
Less gripping are the pedestrian tasks constructing Isolation’s facade of tangible objectives. There’s nothing wrong with having to find the occasional keycard or requiring a series of generators be kick-started, but it strains belief when it composes the majority of Amanda’s A to B movement. Sevastopol is a dying station woefully underequipped to deal with the threat of a live xenomorph, and yet Amanda’s most frequent roadblock is electrical failure or locating a password on a computer next to a keypad. Isolation is indeed a videogame and it needs something to constantly shuffle its protagonist around, but the repetitive nature and engorged amount of time spent doing it inevitably serves as a mark against it.
Contrary to its title, Amanda spends a considerable amount of time dealing with non-xenomorph opposition. Early portions of the game use language suggesting Amanda will be stumble upon both passive and aggressive groups of survivors, though the latter seems to be in much greater frequency. Rogue humans are usually armed to the teeth, and won’t hesitate to gun Amanda down. Most of the time this works to your advantage, as a single gunshot is basically a summoning device for a xenomorph. Throughout the course of Isolation I didn’t kill a single human myself, rather opting to jet into a room, fire a shot in the air with my pistol, and then hide somewhere until everyone on the premises was systematically eviscerated.
Sevastopol is also home to another form of rogue residents in the form of its Working Joes. Androids operating under immoral confidential orders are one of Alien’s recurring themes, and it’s explored thoroughly in Isolation. With glowing red eyes and a permanently stoic face, Working Joes come across like a cross between Michael Myers and the Terminator. Th ey’re also tough to kill, will come after you even after being set on fire, and calmly utter uncomfortable phrases like, “You and I are going to have a talk about safety.” Androids aren’t especially lethal, they’ll smack Amanda around before she’s able to break free, but tension remains high when they start popping up in packs. Oddly, the xenomorph has little interest in androids, so you can count on a couple instances where they’ll both be a problem.
Isolation broadcasts a disappointing resolve to not go down quietly. The game conceptually ends about ten hours in. The narrative meets an acceptable resolution, and it’s paced to close its characters and setting. Instead, new plot devices are adapted from Alien lore and injected into Isolation’s spiraling narrative. The final chapter is an insult to Isolation’s established goals, but everything else on the way there just feels like, well, more Isolation without impetus to try anything new. Isolation is a twenty hour game that said everything it needed to say well before its credits inevitably roll. I found myself wondering if these are the sins that have to be committed for a big budget project to hit a perceived measure of value, that it needed to be longer than similarly styled but lower cost games like Outlast or Among the Sleep.
Even in occasional failure, Isolation is more interesting than many of its peers. Highly produced and conceptually dense games typically feature an action archetype killing everything until it’s all dead. Isolation grants a think-first shoot-sometimes (or maybe never) experience that rewards a more cerebral approach to its systems. Spotlighting a thoughtful heroine and taking place inside a realized vision of an impossible future are also strong assets rarely seen in interactive entertainment. Isolation’s imperfections can rend and devour the resolve of even the most patient players, but its commitment to world-building and thoughtful approach to AI interaction on the right side of indifference. On the scale it operates, there’s nothing else like it.
