Alien: Isolation Officially Revealed
I’ve been following every space scrap of news on this project for a while now – Alien and its film progeny, Jimmy Cameron’s opus in particular, being my favorite series in the history of the silver screen – but it’s refreshing to have the loading bay doors officially blown off of Alien: Isolation.
Though the game is set in the first-person, don’t expect Isolation to be yet another Hoo-rah-tastic corridor shooter as hollow as the sound of pulse rifle fire. Creative Assembly is seeking to create the Alien game no other developer has tried before: a methodically paced, suffocatingly atmospheric love letter to the bump-in-the-dark horror Ridley Scott famously put to film back in 1979.
Fifteen years after the Nostromo vanished from the star map, Amanda Ripley finds herself aboard the Sevastopol Station, the floating husk of a former trading port. The Company says she may find an answer to her mother’s disappearance there. What she does find is one ruthless, near unstoppable killing machine of an extraterrestrial that will stalk her, find her, and end her unpleasantly unless she uses her wits and what little supplies she can scrounge up to survive. Like mother, like daughter.
As much as I’d love for a team of perfect fans to crack Aliens’ formula and deliver a riveting action game instead of a derivative train wreck, I’m glad we’re not gagging on another space marine shooter. The films are, and always have been, firmly rooted in horror. It’s time video games stopped treating xenomorphs as canon fodder, having you blast apart hordes of them. It’s time to be afraid of them again.
Alien: Isolation, expected for late this year, is releasing for PC, PS3, 360, PS4, and Xbox One.