When does something become a habit? This one started with Elite Dangerous, the fourth game in the space trading series that started in 1984 and I first experienced on the BBC Micro shortly after. It was on the Atari ST that it would become one of my top ten favourite games of all time though, and probably only second to Kick Off on there too in terms of hours spent playing any game ever on anything! And that’s partly why I never got around to Elite Dangerous when it eventually got to Xbox Game Pass after its original release on Xbox One in 2015, a year after the PC original… Certainly partly also intimidation, what with being so late to the party, but I think mostly because I didn’t want to get that sucked in all over again because I don’t have teenager spare time on my hands anymore! But with two days left before it was removed from the service at the end of August 2022, I had nothing to lose so I installed it, did the tutorial and spent the next two days loving every second! Strangely, having then bought it in a sale for £4.99 not that long after, I’ve still not touched it since for all the same reasons all over again! Which, incidentally, are the same reasons its earliest predecessor still hasn’t been covered in-depth anywhere here so far!

Fast forward to the end of February 2023 and I’d clearly learnt nothing, although for the life of me I’ve no idea why it had taken the best part of ten years to get to Alien: Isolation, let alone leave it until another two days before it was removed from Game Pass to actually have a go! No excuses whatsoever this time though, and you could say more like the complete opposite! They might not be my absolute favourites, but Alien (the franchise) is great even when it’s not at its greatest, and I’m a big fan of the first four films in particular, often going back-to-back through my Alien Quadrilogy boxset. I love the original Alien from 1979 for its sci-fi horror, and I really like Aliens from 1986 for its sci-fi action horror, and Alien 3 from 1992 is alright even if it’s more style over substance, and Alien Resurrection from 1997 has got almost-peak Winona Ryder in it so can do no wrong! We have a motivation to play, then, and while it’s certainly not the only game that’s sat in my Game Pass Play Later list since the day I first jumped across from PlayStation a few years ago, I’m more confused about why I’ve stayed away from Alien: Isolation from the outset!

I was rocking a PlayStation 4 when it came out on there, as well as on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC, back in October 2014, developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. I seem to remember it being very well hyped for ages beforehand and reviewing pretty well at the time but maybe it wasn’t quite as highly regarded as it seems to be almost nine years on as I write. All I can really put it down to is rarely buying stuff day one back then, not having a huge amount of gaming time with both a seven year-old son and very active musical outfit on the go, then just kind of forgetting about it as newer things came along – terribly mundane stuff, I’m afraid! On the plus side, by the time I’d realised quite how much I was enjoying it more recently, and also that there was no way I was seeing the end in two days no matter how hard I tried, I was able to get a backwards-compatible (FPS-boosted) physical copy on eBay for a fiver (including postage!) and continue savouring every minute without any worries about the Game Pass clock counting down, or, indeed, any of its whims in future as far as what was already quickly shaping-up to become an all-time favourite is concerned!

The films are a good launchpad to get into the game’s plot, set in 2137, which is fifteen years after the original Alien movie, where we find ourselves onboard the Nostromo, a commercial space tug whose crew comes across a mysterious abandoned spaceship on a mysterious, uncharted planet, which results in all sorts of chest-bursting, face-hugging extraterrestrial horror once they’re back onboard their own ship. The only survivor is Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, who ends up in stasis for her return trip to Earth, only to wake up decades later with no one believing her wild tales at the start of Aliens. Until it all kind of happens again, but with a bunch of space marines in tow this time, leading her into Alien 3 where she ends up with an alien embryo in her, and then comes back as a clone in Alien Resurrection two-hundred years later. And Ripley is important here because Alien: Isolation is all about her daughter, Amanda, who was briefly introduced in Aliens, and in the extended cut we learn had lived and died during that original 57-year stasis back to Earth.

Right, just to summarise, we’re fifteen years after Alien and forty-two years before Aliens, when Amanda Ripley finds out someone’s found the flight recorder of her missing mother’s ship, the aforementioned Nostromo, and is currently located on Sevastopol, a space station owned by the Seegson Corporation in orbit around a gas-giant called KG-348 in the Zeta Reticuli star system, which you can actually see with the naked-eye if you’re ever out and about at night in the southern hemisphere! Anyway, she’s offered a place in the retrieval team by a sympathetic android by the name of Christopher Samuels who also belongs to her employer, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (who you might remember as the ones trying to use the aliens from Alien 3 as a biological weapon), so off they go on the courier ship Torrens, together with another corporate executive, Nina Taylor. All’s clearly not well when they eventually arrive, though, with the space station in a bad state and no way to communicate with it, so they all decide to space-walk in but get separated after being hit by debris, so we find ourselves taking control of Ripley as she makes her dramatic solo entrance.

It’s a shame that while your character has no idea what’s lurking somewhere later on, you do, from the name on the box alone, let alone any trailers, reviews and years of spoilers! I guess the best you can hope for is knowing it’s coming but having no idea when or where, and that probably adds to the tension as the opening scenes take you through a lot of accidental darkness and damaged space station (rather than alien) related jump scares while you’re learning the basics. You don’t know tension yet though! What you will quickly realise is how wrong things really are here, from angry and despairing graffiti on the walls to the body bags strewn all over the place. You’re also quickly introduced to the general flow of the game, set across nineteen missions, as you search for ways to open up doors to new areas or backtrack to old ones to progress the plot, solving basic puzzles or completing “mini-games” while doing your very best to survive all kinds of environmental, android, human and alien horrors because this is no gung-ho first-person shooter; you have weapons at your disposal but ammo is always scarce and they’re probably not going to help much anyway – in fact, often the opposite with all that noise they’re making!

Although there’s not a huge amount of actual threat in these opening stages, that doesn’t mean you won’t feel it! You just won’t feel it like you will later on! As alluded to just now, you already know there’s an alien you can’t kill on the loose somewhere even if the game hasn’t told you there is yet, so from the very outset you’re going to be listening to every creak and bang, hiss and scrape just wondering if this is the moment it’s going to make an appearance. And there’s one of the games highlights – its sense of dread is beyond anything else I’ve experienced in a video game, and actually a lot of that is down to the sound design, which is a bit like lying in bed at night, unable to sleep and listening to mundane yet suddenly otherworldly noises, but here you’re not in bed but in a doomed space station where it’s all ramped up to eleven and lovingly crafted to instil maximum terror! Most if not all came from the original movie too, so no surprise the sound effects are so effective, and none more so than when the alien does finally make an appearance, and that dread becomes outright panic like none other as you start to hear very real and very up-close crashing and bashing and monstrous footsteps and snarling and weird clicking! There’s a real density added to the sound with continuous but less threatening environmental noises, whether sirens or mechanical stuff or just “space noises” that combine with an authentic soundtrack of original movie themes, big orchestral dramatics and more melancholy, very seventies, proto-industrial ambience.

This masterclass in audio terror is just phase one of the panic though. You’re going to die a variety of very graphic, very gruesome deaths in this game (accompanied by even more gratuitous sound effects). And you’ll be doing that a lot! And if – as you soon realise – you can’t fight back, you’ve got to run away; except running away is going to make a load of noise and attract the thing even more, so next best is finding somewhere to hide, and very quickly the first thing you’ll do as you enter any new area is work out where the nearest locker or filing cabinet or ventilation shaft you can get into is, or if there’s none of them then the nearest table to get under, although that always feels way more precarious as this thing wanders by with its big tail sweeping about behind it! You do have a motion tracker to give you a fix on where it currently is, although I was generally so scared of its beeping attracting the alien I tended just to rely on sounds to let me know if it was safe to come out yet or not. And sometimes it was just better not to know! I think the game took a little over twenty hours for me to complete, which I know has been a turn-off to many over the years but actually I was so engrossed in being part of this homage to all things Alien that I was happy with whatever time it allowed me there. Of that twenty hours, though, I’d love to know how much time I spent hiding in lockers, peering out of a grill while I myself stayed absolutely motionless (despite never having owned a Kinect accessory!) to avoid alerting the alien loitering around outside for an eternity! There were a few occasions when it was literally that too – ten or fifteen minutes of it circling around happened several times!

The unpredictability of your predicament – dictated by the unpredictability baked into the alien’s AI (as well as rumoured learning from your behaviour) – really drives the stress here, which again is something this game excels at – I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a game more consistently stressful! And its real genius is that even when you’re being left alone by the alien, whether briefly when it’s disappeared back into the ceiling or around a corner in a corridor, or during prolonged sections of the game where it’s away somewhere else, the stress never leaves you because you know that any time it’s going to come back again and there’s nothing you can do about it! As strange as it sounds, I was at my happiest hiding away in lockers while it wandered by – kind of like sheltering from the rain in a bus stop! They won’t always save you though because this thing is searching for you, and one false move and it will start sniffing around your hiding place, triggering a very tense quick-time event where you need to stop breathing and slowly sink deeper down away from the grill. There’s also ways of distracting it and even fighting back to an extent later on, and I guess one problem I did have with the game being so long is that after a while the dread becomes expectation, and the panic when it arrives is replaced by a more methodical hiding and moving and hiding loop as you get a relative fix on what it’s up to at any given time. In terms of distraction, this is where all the stuff you’ll be collecting out of boxes, left lying around on furniture and always on dead bodies will come into play. There are various types of components to look out for everywhere you go, as well as a bunch of blueprints that will allow you to craft consumables like flares and smoke bombs, as well as all-important first-aid supplies. And while I’m a total crafting philistine, this seemed very immediate and intuitive – you open up a dial populated with stuff you’ve discovered how to craft, and if your components can fill its ingredients list then one shoulder button press will craft it and add it to your inventory. Getting something into action mid-fight or flight is a bit more clunky but you get used to it, and in reality I spent most of my components on medi-kits, which, given the amount of time you spend hiding, there’s usually also the opportunity to top up your health with at your leisure.

There’s one more element of panic that persists throughout the game, and that’s all thanks to the classic survival horror save-point! There’s no auto-saving, so you’re on the constant, desperate lookout for the telephones on the wall that allow you to save your progress. You’ll also come across stations that allow you to update your map too that highlight these among other things, though it can be even worse knowing there’s one right near you but just out of reach after you’ve spent the last fifteen minutes getting stuff done and surviving the latest onslaught only to get impatient and end up being impaled by some kind of alien protrusion just as you reach it! Getting to one is a real mini-victory though, and always a massive relief… except when it informs you there’s hostiles nearby so you can’t save! There is a cooldown on it too, so spamming it as you, for example, locate various power terminals dotted around one area to get that back up and running, isn’t an option. I should also mention that although the game does eventually evolve into you versus Alien, it isn’t the only hostile that might be nearby. There are plenty of human stragglers on Sevastopol who aren’t all exactly pleased to see you, as well as the android “Working Joes” going about their slightly sinister servitude. Humans don’t tend to be much of a threat and can usually be avoided, though they do go down fairly easily if not, even if melee combat is very janky and only marginally less unpredictable than the alien as a result! And while I’m on a bit of a negative, the humans look and move a bit crap too, which is at odds to everything else that really still stands up well. I’ll come back to that, but first I want to come back to the Working Joes who will become the bane of your life for much of the game, albeit in a good way! Think zombies in Resident Evil – slow-moving but relentless, and absolutely lethal if you let them get close, and they take a lot of hits to go down, even shotgun hits to the face! I guess you can outrun (or even avoid, if you’re lucky) about half of these encounters, but if not then this is where that precious ammo needs to go, and there are a couple of frantic encounters with big groups of these in the late game where you’ll throw any regard for ammo conservation out of the window! Amazingly, the developers seem to recommend playing this on hard difficulty but screw that – I just about coped with normal and saw no need to prolong these non-alien encounters; and those are already one-hit kills whatever the level of difficulty!

I was going to tell you about a couple of really memorable Working Joe encounters… The first of these begins with this acceptance that you’re going to have to let them in to where you previously went for refuge if you want to get your mission done, which turns into this frantic chase around a confined space that the combat and movement controls just about cope with as you try and stay alive long enough to work out how to get to the really cool pay-off waiting at the end of this unexpectedly action-packed bit of panic. The second was my favourite mission in the whole game, The Descent, where actually the Working Joes are just a tool to make you feel even more helpless and overwhelmed before things get as tense as you can bear without deciding to stay hidden in a filing cabinet forever, in turn before things get frantic again, then totally exhilarating as everything goes to hell and you realise that everything you’ve loved about the game until now has just been condensed into the last thirty minutes all over again, and as spent as that’s left you there’s no way you’re turning off the console until you’ve got out of this place now! I’m intentionally not going into the plot too much, but along the way you’ll become intimate with that vast space-station, both inside and out, as you’re reunited with your fellow crew members as well as more (or less) friendly survivors on the space station, and drawn into the mysteries that brought everyone to where they are. Given that you’re there because it’s where your mother’s flight recorder turned up, it’s hopefully not too much of a spoiler to say that you come across it during your adventure, and it was a really welcome surprise to hear Sigourney Weaver reprising the role of Ripley, just for this game! Apart from her, the storyline characters might not have huge depth or be as memorable as those from the original movie but they’re well scripted and well acted, in particular your own Amanda Ripley.

The sound effects might be the star of the show but the visuals really do capture the feel of the original Alien movie too, running with that lo-fi seventies sci-fi vibe, with CRT monitors, cassette decks, knobs and dials powering this futuristic marvel of human endeavour. I think I got the biggest kick out of some of the planetary vistas you regularly caught sight of outside of the space station though, and even more so the ones when you’re forced outside, their huge, destructive scale amplified by the slow pace of your big, cumbersome spacesuit. And while it might look spectacular, there’s never the time for sightseeing and you genuinely want to get out of there way faster than that thing will allow! That panic thing again… I’d say the art style has about eighty percent stood the test of time, with the more metallic areas like corridors, for example, still looking great – beautifully lit and full of atmospheric flourishes like smoke or gas or fire popping out of broken valves – but on the flipside some of the more colourful and well-lit areas, such as living quarters, have this kind of waxy, cartoon sheen to them. The same goes for your hands when they’re in front of you, and, as mentioned earlier, especially other characters, with plenty of uncanny valley circa 2014 going on, which also sometimes manifests in your movement, like when you’re manoeuvring into a vent or down a ladder. It’s fine but isn’t quite as smooth as what I believe is the 60fps boosted framerate on Xbox Series X, though if you stuck me on original hardware I doubt I’d notice the difference! You do move smooth when you’re you’re not tangled up on some unintended obstacle though. And so does our not-so-friendly neighbourhood alien! That thing looks great – pretty much perfect, in fact, and it moves about like the boss it is! As much character as it has terror, and so much time has clearly gone into conveying that unpredictability, from its AI and into its various animations. Shoutout to the cutscenes as well because I reckon they’d have been pretty state-of-the-art at the time.

I wasn’t planning on covering Alien: Isolation here but having just played it for the first time, it was one of those games I just wanted to talk about – which is why I’ve gone from the hip rather than create any kind of structure for what you just read! But I’ve gone from the heart too, which hopefully makes up for that, and I hope I got most of it covered anyway! This isn’t just a great survival horror game but a great Alien game too, created with painstaking devotion to the franchise – did I mention the keycards you use on the phones to save the game are straight out of the film? Loads of that stuff! I just realised I didn’t mention the regular timed tuning-hack puzzle which I thought was fantastic too. And I usually hate puzzles! And I usually hate crafting! And most of all I usually hate stealth! But here we are – game mechanics I actively despise that this thing made not only tolerable but positively enjoyable! Which is also the case when it comes to all that tension, dread and panic, which I guess are pretty powerful ingredients when it comes to survival horror. And – looking objectively for a second – while the pacing might have gone up and down with some repetitive or tedious missions in the middle of the game, as well as a bit of undercooked plot (or at least plot hidden in very missable collectibles), the stress levels rarely dropped at all, and that’s some going for a game that’s twenty hours long! The sound design is unsurpassed too, and some of the sights totally mesmerising despite its last-gen credentials, and the end-game is as intense and exhausting as I’ve experienced since Journey. The dust hasn’t quite settled yet but I’ve not doubt this is going into my big list of all-time favourites!