Let's kick off with this: I absolutely hate playing Alien: Isolation, it's a brilliant
game but I bloody hate it. It's awful, it's harrowing, and I love it - it's a lot like
Loose Women in that way.
In Isolation you play Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Sigourney Weaver's character from the Alien
films. It's really interesting for Alien fans because it's sort of between the first film
Alien and the second Aliens, and it's mostly complete gubbins. The long and the short of
it is, you're on a space station, you're looking for your mum and nobody likes you. Not the
other people stranded there, not the weird RealDoll androids who work there and especially
not the gangly-limbed necromorph that follows you around like you're Michael Douglas and
it's the hybrid offspring of Glenn Close and a scorpion.
And that's basically the premise: you're trapped on a spaceship with the galaxy's most infamous
predator... well, the one without the knighthood. If Alien the film with all it's forceful face-hugging
intercourse and chest bursting labour, is a horror story about sex and birth. Then Isolation
is about living with the child afterwards, in that it's mostly screaming and trying to
get away from it. Now the brilliance of what developers Creative Assembly have done is
cultivate this unrelenting air of fear. And I could spend ages describing all the ways
it does this, but it's probably easier just to show you.
Come on then Alien.
Bring it. But that's kind of the cool thing with this game, like, she's quite slow and
kind of cumbersome, she doesn't move very quickly.
Get in.
Everything, it's kind of all very purposeful everything that she does. Which makes it all
tenser because you can't just ninja your way out of situation.
Get in there. Get in that room.
I've just kicked a stool over.
Argh! No!
Can I get back in there?
Less than 30 seconds into the actual map, can I go back to the safe zone?
What I'm gonna do..
Is die most likely.
As soon as I see it, I'm going to flame it up.
It's like properly hunting him, it's like using sound and smell.
It's literally like sneaking towards me. And now because of the light and the smoke coming
out of this cupboard, sort of like a Prince concert, I can't see.
All the lighting and everything is brilliant as well because it kind of, it's really atmospheric
but it makes it difficult to see what's going on sometimes. So there's times where all the
lights will just randomly go out as you're going through an area.
You realise it just went into the vents? This is such a mistake, this is such a mistake.
Get in there, get in there, that's safe. Look at that, if you could just wheel yourself
along in the cart I feel like that would be the ideal way to travel.
It sometimes walks with sort of it's arms out like this, it's got this sort of weird
little strut going on.
Like Bez.
If it had a set of maracas I would find it less daunting.
No that's, that was such a mistake.
I don't want to play anymore.
And the campaign is all well and goodl, but the purest expression of what Alien: Isolation
is all about is Survivor Mode: where it's just you and the Alien, toe-to-claw, mano-e-awkward
sex metaphor. It's against the clock and it's exactly the thing you will use to show off
the game to your friends - who you obviously dislike as why would you put them through
this, it's horrible? The only problem is that you only get one level, the Basement, with
Isolation, the rest it seems Sega are holding back for paid DLC packs. And that wouldn't
be an issue if the game didn't cost fifty quid in the first place. Or if that fifty
quid game was absolutely perfect. But the only way I can really see this working Sega
is if you want the DLC money, then I at least expect the lip-synching to work, because frankly
Beyoncé lip-synched better at Obama's inauguration. And I want the physics to always work, I don't
want to see boxes, flip-flops, whatever the hell's been left lying around to go flying
across the screen because I awkwardly shuffled into it. Remember the apple fell from the
tree and hit Isaac Newton on the head, it didn't then ping off and blind a child. And
finally, one thing I definitely don't want to see, and did while testing this game for
review, is a second Alien glitching into the game. Because my heart can't take it. Because
at the end of the day, no matter how much I disagree with the business model, this game
is genuinely terrifying and one of the most original things that you are going to play
this year. You absolutely have to play this.