Read our full Alien: Isolation review.
Do you have a beefy gaming machine, an Oculus Rift, and a copy of Alien: Isolation? Do you want to know what it’s like to suddenly look down and see a Xenomorph’s spiny tail protruding from your stomach? Because now you can!
The Creative Assembly’s Sega-published survival horror game was the subject of a custom-made Oculus Rift demo at E3 2014, but the full version of the October 7 release features built-in support for the VR headset, provided you’re OK with applying minor edits — we’re talking basic copy and paste here — to a config file. There’s even an option that automates the entire process, for those that prefer to avoid dirtying their hands with code.
Related: Alien: Isolation is a terrifying monster with an over-long tail
The discovery of Rift support is the product of Reddit-using data miners peering into the files of Alien: Isolation‘s PC release. For DIY folks, you need to jump into the “engine_settings.xml” file in the game’s Data folder and add a few lines of code (found here). Alternatively, you can take the much simpler route of grabbing Reddit user Bilago’s VR Game Launcher/Manager, which now fully supports Alien: Isolation and makes the changes for you.
We haven’t been able to test this out firsthand yet, but there appear to be only minor quirks to playing Isolation in VR based on the responses of Reddit users. In a nice touch, the menus are VR-ready, meaning you can move your head around on menu screens without the jarring effect of text always being locked to the center of the display.
We’ll take some time to tinker with this and see how it plays. Let us know of any successes or failures if you give it a shot yourself. First-person shooter-style gameplay in VR can be disorienting for some players, but we found it to be quite immersive when we tried the Alien: Isolation demo at E3 2014.
