Jul 112014
I know, everyone is adapting the tagline from the original movie to create headlines about this game. It just works so well. Now, when I started to write this post, I thought I’d already blogged about Alien: Isolation in the past. I couldn’t find anything, though, so I must have gotten confused because of the freelance article I wrote about it.
Or maybe my second Alien: Isolation freelance article.
Okay, so I wrote about the game three times.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m really excited about this game. I already pre-ordered it, and I might even suspend my other game priorities to play it as soon as it comes out. (Which will be in October, along with an absurd number of other high-profile games. What in the world is so special about October?) I’ve followed all the news released about it, and I’m hopeful it will truly be the sort of survival horror game I enjoy. While many fans of the genre have pinned their hopes on The Evil Within (which comes out in…October!), my survival horror hopes lie with Alien: Isolation.
Unlike most video game adaptations of the Alien franchise, which favor lots of action and shooting, Isolation plans to capture the mood of the original 1979 film. I watched Alien for the first time last October and quite enjoyed it. If the game can produce that sort of atmosphere, it will already be headed in the right direction.
Alien: Isolation is set 15 years after the first movie. You play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, who is trying to find out what happened to her mother. She goes to the space station Sevastopol… but there’s an Alien on board.
One Alien. It will stalk you. It will adapt to your actions. And it will be terrifying.
You’re not going to mow down Xenomorph after Xenomorph with your guns. One Alien, and you will run and hide.
A lot of the focus has been on the Alien for obvious reasons, but this has led to the popular misconception that Isolation is going to be another game where the protagonist is completely helpless and has to run and hide from everything. That’s not true. There is combat in this game. There are some weapons, and you’ll be able to use them to fight human and android enemies. A while back, I heard you could use weapons to slow the Alien somewhat, but I’m no longer sure this is the case. Either way, it’s not going to be a shooting-fest, but it won’t be 100% running and screaming, either.
And that’s great!
See, there are certain things I want in survival horror. These elements are best seen in the classic Silent Hill and Resident Evil series (yes, I’ll get around to playing Fatal Frame and the other classics soon), which got me into the genre.
Modern survival horror has largely split in two directions. The first direction is what happened to Resident Evil: combat-heavy action games that are “survival horror” because you’re, uh, trying to survive, and…look, something scary! This is one of the outcomes of taking the genre name literally while trying to go mainstream. These games are not survival horror, no matter how many people claim Resident Evil 4 is the pinnacle of the genre. RE4 is not survival horror. Some people claim The Evil Within is a true successor to RE4, which is one of the reasons I’m not interested in it. (It also looks like a gore-fest… which is a cheap way to achieve horror.)
The second direction is the helpless-protagonist-runs-and-hides gameplay popularized by Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which is a fantastic game. Amnesia and games like it are terrifying and awesome. They are survival horror. It’s just not the same survival horror as the classics.
A few games have tried for the fight-or-flight balance of the classic survival horror games. I haven’t played Silent Hill: Downpour yet, but it’s on my list. I’ve heard great things about it. Amy, which isn’t as bad as its reviews suggest, failed to achieve a good balance between the two, but at least it tried. Zombi U is another one on my waiting list, and I have high hopes for it.
And then there’s Alien: Isolation.
Am I setting myself up for disappointment by eyeing this game as the next greatest survival horror game? Maybe. But so far it sounds like just what I need.
Alien: Isolation comes out on October 7, the same day as 6 other game releases. If, like me, you pre-order Isolation, you’ll get a free upgrade to the Nostromo Edition, which includes a DLC episode set during the original movie. Let me know what you think of Alien: Isolation… and tell me if I missed any classic-style survival horror games!