Alien remains a one-of-a-kind nightmare. There’s just no replicating the dread of Ridley Scott’s 1979 deep-space thriller. James Cameron knew that, and smartly did his own thing with Aliens, fashioning a sequel that traded the original’s ruthless minimalism for bug-hunt spectacle. Scott knew it, too, judging from the direction in which he took the franchise with a pair of prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which were heavier on philosophy and mythology than terror. Some of the other entries in the series, including this week’s Alien: Romulus, have gestured toward the primal simplicity of the first, pitting a small group of desperate people against that slimy, sleek killing machine from beyond the stars. But all of them are echoes.
In fact, the only Alien sequel that’s come within spitting distance of Alien — at least in the department of completely shredding nerves — isn’t a movie at all. It’s Alien: Isolation, the 2014 survival-horror game from Creative Assembly.
Unfolding from the first-person perspective of Amanda Ripley, aka the grown daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, Isolation presents itself as a direct follow-up to Scott’s film. But the game forges more than a narrative connection to its cinematic inspiration. It also leans heavily on the values of that sci-fi milestone: deathly quiet, foreboding atmosphere, a tension as thick as the hull of an intergalactic big rig. In doing so, it arguably comes closer to the cold-blooded, white-knuckle spirit of Alien than any of the big-screen offspring the film has hatched.
Alien: Isolation, which turns 10 in October, would be a great game even without the IP branding. It is, like its title attraction, a marvel of pitiless design — a finely tuned fright machine. Set aboard a sprawling space station (think: Deep Space Nine in disarray, overrun by postapocalyptic scavengers), the game alternates stretches of eerily calm exploration with breathlessly suspenseful stealth evasion. Supplies are limited, both in availability and utility. Like most great survival-horror experiences, Isolation puts your back constantly against the wall. You die a lot.
As in Alien, there’s only one Xenomorph (at least for most of the roughly 20 hours of gameplay). Isolation follows the lead of survival-horror descendants like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Clock Tower by turning H.R. Giger’s iconic creature into a stubbornly persistent, effectively unkillable enemy — a monster that pursues you from room to room. The most ingenious tweak to this tradition is taking the beast off script and leash. Thanks to a sophisticated AI system, the Xenomorph is unpredictable, and it seems to “learn” from your playing style, forcing you to constantly vary your crawl-and-hide escape tactics.
These cat-and-mouse encounters, in which crossing a single hallway becomes an exercise in suffocating suspense, make Isolation one of the scariest games ever made. It’s also punishingly difficult at times, fulfilling the prophecy of Alien’s Ash (Ian Holm): “I can’t lie to you about your chances.”
The Xenomorph has lost some of its edge over the years. While Scott used the creature sparingly, giving us associative half-glimpses of its biomechanical anatomy and springing it from the shadows (and air ducts), the other films have steadily diminished its fear factor through repetition. Isolation restores the monster’s power by dropping the player into its tireless warpath. Turns out the Xenomorph is still plenty terrifying when it’s chasing you.
With mechanics this fiendishly clever, Isolation could work without its licensed franchise wallpaper. But it’s also hard to think of a game based on a movie that better captures the whole vibe of said movie. The team at Creative Assembly went all-out in recreating the look and sound and feel of Alien. And 20th Century Fox granted the studio access to a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes material, including preproduction sketches, set photos, and a database of original sound effects recordings. The meticulous fidelity to Alien extends to the clever, now retrofuturistic design. Every piece of technology we see or interact with — the green computer monitors, the lines of code on them, the keycard save system — suggests a vision of the future that could only have been dreamed up in the past. (One of the niftiest things about the new Romulus is how it follows suit with the interface.)
Isolation also engineers a surprisingly satisfying continuation of Alien’s story, albeit one naturally structured around fetch quests and stealth action set pieces. The saga of Ellen Ripley, stretching from the original to 1997’s Alien: Resurrection, was a fatalistic tragedy: Across decades of time and light years of space, one capable woman is stalked by the toothed personification of evil and the soulless corporation that sanctions it. Even death doesn’t free Ripley from this struggle! Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, the game extends Ripley’s plight to her daughter, as though fleeing the Xenomorph were her dark birthright. That’s a cruel twist on the legacy sequel, but Isolation tempers it with poignant closure; the emotional climax of the game is the moment where Amanda Ripley finds the Nostromo flight log, and gets to hear the farewell message her mother left for her.
Still, the most meaningful relationship in Isolation is the one between the player and Alien. This is a deeply affectionate piece of fan fiction, steeped in a tonal and aesthetic appreciation for Scott’s original. Its creators have offered something games adapted from movies promise, but rarely deliver: the chance to navigate an immersive version of a cinematic world you’ve come to know and love. Isolation is a virtual theme park where the theme is Alien. It puts you inside a classic.
And more than simply a rigorously faithful audio/visual experience, the game plugs you right into the heightened emotions of Alien. Creeping around the devastated station, peering around corners to catch glimpses of the Xenomorph on the prowl, you effectively become Ripley. In that way, Isolation uses the interactive component of its own medium to make the terror of Alien feel new again. And that’s something the other movies, even the great ones, couldn’t hope to offer.
Alien: Isolation is available on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC, and mobile. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
