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092
Right Isolation
takes the
pre-Bishop
approach to
synthetics:
they’re hostile
and dangerous.
Left Throwers
of flame stall
rather than kill
the creature,
but they’re still
useful tools.
And what is being shown? Panels. Fat-keyed
computer consoles. Hexagonal architecture.
Isolation hasn’t so much copied the worn,
antiseptic future of Scott’s film as it has absorbed
it on a molecular level. The game is beautiful
– not just film grain and lighting pretty, but
artfully constructed in a way that makes it deeply
pleasurable to simply be inside. And there’s a
great deal of it to be inside – the deserted space
station Sevastopol on which the majority of the
game takes place is huge. A maze of corridors
and sectors that, most impressively of all,
never repeat on me. Isolation’s team has, firstly,
taken the time to appreciate and understand
the aesthetic of Alien, and then had the talent
to recreate that aesthetic. And it’s clear that
they spent ages doing it – there is a wealth of
variation in the environments that cumulatively
gives the game a rare richness.
And then there’s the xeno. The fundamentals
of the gameplay are built around your encounters
with this creature, although encounters
is probably the wrong word – your chief
“THE GAME’S BEST MOMENTS
COME WHEN THE XENO HUNTS
YOU WHILE YOU’RE MID-TASK.”
objective is in fact to never
encounter it at all. This alien
is pure ruthless lethality,
and you cannot beat it, only
divert and – with the right
equipment – deter. The game
is therefore a thing of stifled
stealth – literally, if you turn
on the PlayStation Camera’s
microphone the alien responds
to your real-life yelps –
which compresses you into its
beautiful environments. You
crouch everywhere, even when
there’s no sign of the creature
on your motion tracker, and
you’ll dive into cupboards and
vent shafts at the merest ping.
For the most part this works
wonderfully. The quality of the
surroundings and the strength
of the xeno, this is everything
an Alien game should be. Its
best moments come during
free-form stalking sections,
where the beast tracks you
through the station as you
fetch and carry for certain
objectives. These are fluid and
unpredictable, forcing panicked
interaction with the station
around you, diving under
tables, scrambling through
menus to rewire circuitry to
distract the alien while praying
it’s not behind you.
BUG HUNT
But – and it is heartbreaking
at this point to say ‘but’ –
Isolation has a few problems
with action. These are hinted
at as early as the first cutscene
– good looking, but not
groundbreaking – which suffers
frame jitters severe enough to
knock its synch out of whack.
Later, violent confrontations
with the scattered, paranoid
humans aboard the Sevastopol
often turn deflatingly clumsy
– not in a frantic, thematically
sound way, but in a ‘these
physical elements within
the game aren’t meeting and
reacting to each other how
they should’ way. And Amanda
Ripley, engineer and heroine
of the piece, can’t aim down
while fighting on stairways.