QCF: Alien: Isolation

hen done right, playing a scary video game that manages to be legitimately unsettling, can trigger an entirely different dimension of fear that other forms of media will never be able to emulate, and that even goes for film. Agency is no longer a power struggle, but now a will to survive, and every action has an entirely different weight behind it’s consequence than a mere failure—the test of nerve under these settings can be maddening for some; if the impact is there of course, but in more recent years, it’s been lacking.

In a twist of strange coincidence, Ridley Scott’s Alien license within the realm of games have also been lacking, so it was only a matter of time before we would see the iconic Xenomorph return to its roots, and Sega’s efforts have never been so determined like they have with Alien: Isolation.

As far as scares and anxiety go, Alien Isolation gets the job done, and does it with gusto; but while it's certainly effective with the space frights, this isn't a sensation that can carry an entire game into an experience that's worth playing, and much is the case with the latest endeavor of the Sci-Fi monster show.

See, the irony behind everything that’s flawed with this deep-space outing just so happens to come from just how intensely it's focused towards its desire to scare and stress out anyone who plays it, it’s all laid on a bit more thick than it’s actually able to manage. For starters, In spite of the presentation placing so much stock around the danger of the Alien, you know the one that's been hyped up to persistently hunt and stalk you, Alien: Isolation isn’t exactly all that isolated—nearly everything that has the capacity to try and kill you, will do just that.

Within the earliest stages of the game, Isolation makes strides in pacing players through all of the different threats they’ll encounter before the Alien even makes its grand appearance. The convenient premise of calamity and mayhem allows for a majority of the human encounters to be hostile, on account of their will to survive driving them completely mad, and then there are the mannequin androids…

While it naturally would make sense to pad the gameplay dynamics with additional elements that go beyond its cat-and-mouse core, the culmination of brutally one-sided AI, and broken stealth mechanics only go on to compound the degrees of frustration experienced with the game than any legitimate fear and panic ever will.

Dead-shot accuracy with shooting, exorbitant resistance to damage, sixth-sense like awareness and detection (which can be heightened to an entirely different level of ludicrous should you enable the noise recognition option for any given camera peripheral connected), and so much more. It’s these troublesome blemishes within the design of the gameplay that can make an enemy encounter a real bastard of a run-in.  

Be it man or machine, these other unfriendly factions can be even more relentless than the lead-antagonist itself at times, and in a lot of those instances, it hardly makes any sense as to how they manage to get the best of you within a matter of seconds. Try as you might, it’s only a matter of time before these issues  begin to encumber the experience; the anxiety and helplessness of trying to stay alive steadily descends into a tedious imposition of merely working through all of the exasperating odds that are stacking against you.

Despite all of these setbacks, the most inexcusable sin to be dealt with in terms of Alien: Isolation’s design is its abysmal progression system, or more accurately, it’s almost complete lack thereof a system.

While it’s arguable that the hand-holding direction and development in most modern games may have softened my nerve towards challenging difficulty, that’s just simply not the case here, or most anyone else for that matter because not since the early nineties have there ever been a game that didn’t provide any checkpoints during gameplay.

You just read that right; there are NO checkpoints in Alien: Isolation—no auto-saves, logs, or milestones to be found at all. The only way to chart your progress is to record at the immediate save station you're able to come in contact with. Failure to do so means that whatever untimely death you incur, will impede you all the way back to the last time you charted down any game progress at some arbitrary pit stop, (pit stops that’re terribly paced and positioned along the way I might add), without an ounce of mercy for anything beyond that otherwise.

So, to reiterate, take all of those drawbacks of the AI and stealth design that I mentioned before, and then contrast them against them against the consequence of potentially losing anywhere from forty-five minutes, to an hour of progress you made—to specify, this means you can even be sent back a stage if you die before find a save station.

Listen, I won’t deny credit where credit’s due, the plot-staged encounters with the iconic extraterrestrial channel all of the essentials for the sense of terror and despair it aims to deliver; it’s all of the broken bullshit in between that changes the experience from soul-shaking to soul-crushing.

There may be bursts here that can handily deliver some of the best Alien-oriented gaming that we've seen in a long time, and the direction is certainly the most innovative in comparison for that matter, but it’s still a bitter disappointment in the very end, with the only difference being the amount of missed potential that this title could’ve tapped into, as opposed to all the significantly-more abysmal Alien games that came before it.