Alien: Isolation - Opinions

I honestly want to know what people who like this game are smoking, because I want a hit of it. This is probably the most extreme example of my opinions being out of sync with the majority on a video game. I heard great things about Alien: Isolation for years (particularly in regard to its AI), saw its great review scores, and just assumed it was going to be an atmospheric masterpiece when I finally got around to playing it. I'm even one who gets easily sucked into the atmosphere of a game, but I could not for the life of me find the fun in this one. I was pretty on board for the first hour or two, and I tried hard to enjoy what I could, but the experience just deteriorated steadily as it went on. Even the small details I thought I would appreciate more going forward (the interactive elements and room power management subsystem) either became loathsome or unimportant. Aside from the game's faithful aesthetic and impressive graphics, I can't say I love much about this one, but I'm gonna channel my energy into giving examples so this doesn't just become a rant.

Firstly, the game isn't scary; it's frustrating. Horror in any medium hinges on threatening a character with some terrible fate and convincing the viewer that it isn't a bluff. It doesn't actually matter how the situation resolves, only how the viewer thinks it will. The potency of the climax actually comes from everything surrounding it: the buildup and resolution immediately before and after the event itself. Without enough foreshadowing, the climax feels too sudden, and without a proper resolution, it feels worthless. Doing horror right involves walking along the razor's edge, but I often feel that a lot of video games (not just this one) get the second half wrong way too often.

Compared to non-interactive media, video games are interesting because they allow for tension to be generated beyond the story itself. The player, as an active participant in the experience, is able to feel stress for their own sake, not only for the characters in the story. When a player fails in a video game, it's different than if their avatar in the game had failed. You can punish the player in ways unrelated to the plot, or alternatively ignore the failure altogether. As I see it, there are three avenues available for horror games to deal with player failure:
 1. alter the story (i.e. treat it like any non-interactive media)
 2. harm the player's gameplay effectiveness
 3. erase the player's progress outright

Option 1 is the most traditional way to handle things, since it allows for the player to fail forward into a "worse" storyline if they can't prevent some tragedy from occurring. A staple of choose-your-own-adventure books and similar novelties, this tactic is a natural way to give the audience limited interactivity without compromising the author's influence over the story. As a modern example, I find Telltale's The Walking Dead a particularly effective horror series precisely because it limits the player's options between several tough decisions. It doesn't matter that the game isn't "hard" because the difficulty isn't what generates the tension. The game very clearly demonstrates that nearly every decision the player makes has a tangible impact on the story, and constantly makes the player consult their moral compass to make these decisions while under a time constraint: a perfect recipe for anxiety.

Option 2 is effectively just a difficulty spike, and for any game seeking to tell a static story (i.e. this one), it's a good way to make sure the player stops having fun after a few failures. Used well, this approach makes it possible to tell a dynamic and immersive story through such punishment (LISA: The Painful does this), but you have to build the experience entirely around the concept. Many roguelike/roguelites like Darkest Dungeon also take this route, since the difficulty is often the appeal of such games. With only loose interaction between story and gameplay, however, this option feels more like a tax on the player's sanity than a meaningful addition to the game (see: Dark Souls 2 vs. Dark Souls 3).

Option 3 is clearly the most utilized of the set, with basically every game tracing its lineage back to arcade machines which made you fear losing your money at every harrowing turn. While certainly not photorealistic, games of this period had no issues instilling terror into those approaching the final stage with only one life remaining, since even with continues, you'd have to trade a couple more quarters for a second chance. Because losing your progress was tantamount to losing your money, player failure carried a powerful consequence. As games moved away from testing the player's wallet and more towards testing their patience, deaths gradually became less meaningful. With the advent of checkpoints and autosaves, even game overs lost their value, to the point where modern games now rarely feature them at all.

For some reason, though, games intentionally built to instill terror have routinely ignored this trend, and still attempt to derive their main source of tension from a gameplay mechanic that has gradually lost its relevance as the years have passed. The first reason why this is an issue is that it's dependent on difficulty, which itself is becoming a troublesome mechanic because a player rarely knows what difficulty level is appropriate for a game they haven't played yet. If someone selects too low a difficulty, they might find themselves deprived of the game's main draw, while more inexperienced ones could find themselves simply frustrated in pursuit of a thrill. The second, and arguably the most important, issue with this system is that the punishment for player failure (the main source of tension in the gameplay) remains consistent regardless of what challenge they are faced with. No matter how loud the volume gets or how dark the environment becomes, when dying to the final challenge of a game costs you less time than dying to a random enemy in stage 3 purely because the latter is simply farther from a checkpoint, there's just no way I'm going to feel pressured by the finale of the game. I've played far too many games that pretend dying to the final boss is a more grievous error than dying to any other section of the game simply because the visuals are more impressive at the time of my demise.

For this reason, I prefer to treat games like Alien: Isolation more as rollercoasters than haunted houses, but frustratingly, Alien: Isolation doesn't even let you enjoy the ride at some points. The game has a problem conveying that a section is action-heavy vs. stealth-heavy, and loves to send mixed signals as you try to figure out which type you're dealing with. I love taking time to chew the scenery in games, but Alien: Isolation often punishes that curiosity by placing collectibles and lore in sections where you must hide from the xenomorph or sneak around enemies. To immerse yourself further in the world thus requires you to court death, which I'd totally buy as a commentary on the world of Alien itself if wasn't so aggravating in practice. Likewise, there are also sudden timed sections that completely invalidate a slow, methodical approach, and action sequences that force you to abandon the stealth gameplay you otherwise rely upon entirely. While functional, non-stealth gameplay is clearly not the intended way to play through the majority of the game, and it shows when it's forced upon you. Fighting anything at melee range feels goofy and unpredictable and engaging more than one enemy at once only makes it worse. All of these things combined made it so that every time I wasn't successfully sneaking around enemies with perfect results, I wasn't having fun. Getting spotted usually meant I was dead, and it never felt worth the time to try and weasel my way out of bad situations when I could just reset and try stealthing better next time. Failure never felt like an opportunity to get creative, just a reason to get angry. The game doesn't treat your mistakes as a learning experience, and that's the thing that stung most about playing it.

Failing in a video game *can* be fun, but when the player's failure no longer serves as a teaching moment, that failure becomes detrimental to the fun and starts highlighting issues in the design. It turns the player against the game itself. During my playthough, there were two egregious sections where I got stuck for over an hour, which led me to hyper-analyze the enemies in hopes of getting past them. This naturally broke all the immersion I'd built up once I saw the state machine in action behind the movements of the xenomorph. I was no longer interested in outsmarting it, but exploiting it. For such a touted achievement as this game's AI was, I really expected to make more decisions other than "hide under table, use flamethrower if caught, crouch-walk to next table, repeat". It's painfully obvious that the alien is tethered to you so you can't outrun it or trick it to stay too far behind, and its behavior on the ground is rigid enough that one can easily see how it's manipulated by gadgets just like any other enemy in the game. I never once felt like I was being hunted by an intelligent creature, I felt like I was being toyed with by a malevolent game designer.

There's just something wrong when the core gameplay loop involves either throwing a (limited supply) distraction across the room or waiting literally 2 minutes for the AI to give up and cycle back into its routine away from the cabinet you're hiding in. Making the player feel powerless for minutes on end with no agency may sound like an interesting idea, but it turns out terribly unfun in practice, and it only gets worse when the game decides to ignore those penalties when it would otherwise break the plot. Why am I instantly killed every time I'm caught by the alien for 15 hours of gameplay, but only knocked out and tied up (poorly) when it happens in a cutscene at the final hour? Isn't the xenomorph played up to be an animalistic creature acting on (a very keen) instinct? Why am I not immediately assaulted by any of the dozens of facehuggers in the area after being tied up, despite quite literally every corpse that's in the same area showing signs of this occurring? Why is it that when I die in any area *other* than this one I'm jettisoned back to the last save station, but now I instead reappear where I was tied up at the end of the last cutscene, courtesy of the one and only "autosave ex machina" in the game? The game isn't afraid to make the player watch cutscenes over and over in all the other cases where they die, so it's *definitely* not to streamline the player experience. Autosaves like this one would have been *such* a quality of life improvement over the current system, but because the game feels designed to be intentionally cruel, that's out of the question.

The save system is absolute garbage and actually worse than a bad autosave system. It takes 5 seconds for the save to actually go through, during which you're locked into staring at the wall. If you hear something behind you, tough luck, you can't turn around to check. The Alien can drop down and kill you in about 5 seconds depending on how close by it appears, so I wouldn't be surprised if its possible to die while you're waiting. There is a way to abort the save if you'd like to run, but as with every other interactive element in the game, it takes at least 2 full seconds (usually more) to hand control back to the player so you're better off gambling that the save goes through because it soft-resets some things in the area. If you do save in a bad enough spot, though, (like 1 second before the xenomorph drops out the ceiling) you might find yourself a nasty death loop because you don't have time to avoid the danger. It certainly would have been helpful to place the save locations in actual safe locations or just fully reset the room so this wouldn't happen, but I digress. Did I mention that there are surprise insta-kills aside from the xenomorph in this game too? As if they needed to add any more frustrating things to the game.

The worst thing about the save system, though, is that the stations lock up after you use them. Because the first thing you always do is run to right up to the station as soon as you see/hear it, all the menial tasks like checking the nearby terminals, typing in passcodes, and picking up junk are necessarily done after you've safely set your checkpoint. If you die, however, you get the privilege of doing all that boring stuff over and over again, even though it would have been totally believable to allow the player to scan their card again to save after they pick up all the junk. Of the many baffling design decisions, this one is the most confusing to me because I can't figure out what locking the save stations is even intended to prevent. If it's to mitigate save-scumming then it utterly failed since most areas have only one entrance and exit and you only return to a previous save station like three times ever; and even still, gimping the save system to fix a problem with level design is a backwards solution.

Aside from the saving-related woes, the next most frequent cause of frustration was the failure to convey gameplay concepts to the player. I'm not talking about a lack of tutorials (there's an abundance of those); I'm talking about actual, mechanical demonstrations of how things work, since the tutorials don't actually teach you anything. I honestly learned more from the hints on the loading screen than I did from NPC's or the environment, which I found gave me conflicting advice throughout my playthrough. Foremost is the first 2 hours' insistence on avoiding groups of enemies (forcing you through 2 situations where you do so). After that, you learn how to melee attack (in self defense, kinda?), obtain a pistol, and are dropped in a room with 4 enemies that have firearms. My monkey brain, having played decades of video games, assumed that these new toys were meant to be used in the very next room as a natural tutorial, but I was wrong. The pistol has 6 shots but you need 8 to kill everyone if you don't miss, so that's not an option; it's also loud so even if you isolate an enemy, the others will rush you. The wrench works only if you sneak up on someone but still takes forever and also makes a ton of noise so you, again, get rushed. I thought that maybe I could execute one enemy, rush into a ventilation shaft to hide, and repeat, but the only vent in that room has a single exit which the enemies will sit beside indefinitely until you come out, like they know that it only has one exit. It turns out you don't ever get a tutorial for the pistol, unless you count the first chance you get (later on) to shoot a synthetic as a tutorial, in which case it's a terrible one since you see it absorb a full clip of ammo from an npc before you're forced to fight it, but are nevertheless expected to shoot it yourself anyway.

The correct answer to my problem, as I found, was to throw a flare, which I received a while back but was also never taught how to use. Throwing this flare across the room caused all 4 enemies to form a hippie circle around it instead of attempting to figure out where it came from, which gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted. As it turns out, *literally* every enemy behaves this way when you throw flares (or any other object really), even the group of 7+ trained soldiers who all patrol a reasonable distance apart until you throw a noisemaker, after which they cram themselves in the corner to stare at the floor in unison. If I was supposed to use explosives for anything other than making a loud noise and running the other way, I honestly never found a chance to; they were much more useful as a distraction, especially since the combat AI never seems to miss a shot and you die in two hits. Of all the times I tried to pick a fight with enemies, I never lost a round with the xenomorph, but died every time save once against humans because aimbots are unfair. If anything, the flashbang was a better noisemaker than The Noisemaker™ because it used more common components and did the same job. I only ever used it to blind people once.

The lack of tutorials continues throughout the game, as you obtain items like the molotov and flamethrower which produce light while you hold it in your hands that's visible to enemies, but never get told that, so you die five times before you have to assume that they do, only to learn that the lights on the noisemaker DON'T attract attention for some reason despite being just as bright from your perspective. Several times I picked up a key item and was forced to watch an in-game cutscene for what feels like an eternity in a locked camera while an enemy slowly approached me and caved in my skull from behind, all as I waited for the game to give me control again (looking at you, bolt gun). In the cases where this didn't happen, I soon died afterwards anyway testing out the new tool that didn't come with an instruction manual (but at least I got a cinematic closeup complete with Depth-of-field effects, right?).

Heck, the game never explicitly tells you that crouching is quieter than walking, even though walking was practially silent to my ears on most floors. I was halfway through the game before I was sure that was the case and I wasn't just getting seen around cover. Alternatively, every time you enter/exit a locker or cabinet to hide, Ripley slams the door as hard as she can to the point where it sounds like a gunshot even though that action is damn near silent to the AI. I'm still unsure if the motion tracker made noise the AI could hear, since I was found several times in a cabinet while using it, but used it all the time under tables and never got caught. The multiple times I did get caught under a table seemed to involve the alien tracking me down out of nowhere with some form of omniscience; other times, I was able to peek corners in plain view and crouch 2 feet from the xenomorph behind a box without issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

As far as the plot goes, I have no major disagreements, but I also can't remember most of it. I'm not a writer, so I really don't care to analyze it beyond saying it was "meh", but for a game so engrossed in adapting such a venerable film's tone, I found it hilarious at how mediocre some of the delivery was and how clumsy the lip-synching turned out. Even in cutscenes, where the dialogue should be at its most impressive, it is flat at best, and the characters hardly emote, making it hard to relate to literally anyone on the ship. At the point when Marlow attempts to destroy the generator, it honestly feels like a parody given how laughably bad the lines are read. Between the tired drama of the crew and the forced "setpiece" moments highlighted by quick-time events (OH GOD THE QUICK-TIME EVENTS) I couldn't wait to get the game over with.

I generally hate quick-time events as a whole so this isn't a jab at Alien: Isolation in particular, but as a rule they are not: immersive, exciting, or even close to being considered gameplay. They are: annoying filler, and at worst, a way to pretend that button mashing is anything but the worst possible way to interact with a video game. Having to combo certain button presses to open specific types of doors or locks was interesting exactly once; thereafter, opening a door ceases to be engaging content; you should be opening doors to get to the content. Also, since they went through such effort to implement the quick-time events, why does literally only one cutscene in the game have them? I didn't feel that the final moments were more intense because I had to frantically pick up my controller again to press the A button. If anything, I was more surprised by the fact that the cutscene quite literally stops as soon as the prompt appears. If it was necessary to stop everything completely, couldn't they have just shown the prompt earlier, or, you know, left them out and just played the cutscene like all the others? I didn't need quick-time events to press the last 10 buttons in cutscenes, after all.

I know that Alien: Isolation came out in 2014 and Prey was released in 2017, but comparing the two reveals how so many things I hated in the former were not a problem in the latter. Prey involves lots of looking at computer screens and panels, which I objected to for different reasons, but it takes less than a second to enter/exit this view instead of 5, and it's sometimes not even mandatory to enter the focused view in the first place. I never would have dreamed to complain about that in Prey, but it was so bad in Alien: Isolation I felt insulted by how much time it wasted. Prey also has powerful enemies that you cannot outrun (just like the xenomorph), but there are numerous ways to deal with them not only beforehand, but also in the moment if you get surprised (since the weapon wheel pauses gameplay), and several of these *aren't* lethal options. Alien: Isolation, on the other hand, doesn't even allow you to keybind your flares, so you have to suffer with a realtime weapon wheel or the scroll wheel every time you want to throw something quickly (which is usually the times you'll need them most). You still feel vulnerable in Prey, especially if you have a bad run of things early on, but you always have options and other interesting ways to approach things if you actually do bite the dust. I NEVER felt compelled to mix things up in Alien: Isolation even when things were at their worst because there are hardly any alternate paths available. There are ways to make the player weak without giving them 1 HP, and there are ways to make the player feel empowered without giving them a BFG. Giving the players options that allow them to be creative is a key part of what makes video games fun, but games like Alien: Isolation seem to take options away just because it *sounds* interesting without realizing how important they really are to actually enjoying the game.

As a final example of a game which I think does horror RIGHT, I have to look to SOMA (spoilers ahead). This game, while not perfect, is a great example of how to merge all three methods of instilling player tension I outlined earlier. Firstly, while the game isn't very dynamic in its major plot, it does offer several small choices, all of which are of more philosophical concern than of gameplay, encouraging the player to think more deeply about the world. Personally, since I was already very much invested in the game's lore by the time I encountered the first of these choices, I was super primed for being creeped out by the monsters once they showed up. From a gameplay point of view, SOMA is very wise to not mix its exploration with its stealth (except for two minor, intentionally subversive cases near the end). Unlike Alien: Isolation, which regularly hinders the player's attempts to learn more about the environment by forcing them to dodge the xenomorph and other enemies, I rarely felt pressured to speed up my roaming in SOMA and nearly always had ample time to scour the area for everything I wanted to find. Additionally, in the rare case I was caught by enemies, I was pleased to find that SOMA often allows the player a second chance with slowed movement and blurred vision, such that the occasional failure is at least a softer punishment instead of an instant reset.

SOMA's enemies, which principally behave similar to the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, are benefitted by only being encountered a few times each, allowing them to remain novel and frightening upon first being encountered without being around long enough to be overanalyzed. Some being faster than the player while others being slower also mixes up the strategy for each area, and keeps each new encounter tense as you judge how best to stay alive instead of defaulting to the same flowchart behavior. By contrast, the xenomorph is encountered so often that I had its behavior very much figured out even before its temporary departure at the end of act 1. SOMA's single (challenging) difficulty level also made it easy to know that I wasn't making things easier or harder than I wanted them to be and let me focus more on the game itself.

Finally, unlike Alien: Isolation and so many other games with more pensive stories that commonly end on bombastic gameplay climaxes, SOMA fills its final act with intimate dialogue that fades into a calm silence (although it does get its big action sequence out of the way not too long before that). There is no failure state at this point of the game, but the player doesn't know that, so things remain tense all the way up to the end because of how good the buildup has been to this point. As a game that not only asks difficult questions about the nature of humanity and existence, but actively lingers on the player's decisions regarding those questions, it's only appropriate that the game go out on a philosophical note. If the xenomorph was used more sparingly, I think Alien: Isolation could have supported a similar ending, but as it is, the story feels basically forced to end on an action-packed climax. Which is a shame, because the gameplay absolutely doesn't support that kind of energy, and the conflicting tone really hinders the end result. I really wish I could've gotten an ending that stuck with me, but unfortunately, all I got in the end was another jump scare.