Even After Seven Years, ‘Alien: Isolation’ Is A Deeply Uncomfortable Game

I was gaming with two friends recently when “Alien: Isolation” came up in the conversation. Among other basic descriptors, I told them that it was by far the most uncomfortable game I’d ever played.

I’d added the caveat that “uncomfortable” might not have been the best word — uncomfortable generally has a negative connotation, yet I adore the game — but it was the best one that came to mind at the time. The more I thought about it, the word was spot-on. “Alien: Isolation” is a deeply uncomfortable game, in the best way. The conversation made me want to put my thoughts into print, and it’s apparently Halloween season already, so here I am. Let’s revisit this sucker.

Developed by Creative Assembly in 2014 and published by Sega on every contemporary platform, “Alien: Isolation” puts players into the first-person perspective of Amanda Ripley, daughter to Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ellen Ripley from the first four iterations of the Alien film franchise. Fifteen years after the events of the inaugural “Alien,” Amanda is approached with news that a salvage crew may have recovered the flight recorder from the Nostromo, a mining ship her mother detonated in the first movie in an attempt to vanquish the murderous xenomorph alien creature. We are brought to Sevastopol, the space station where the salvage crew docked, naturally to discover a complete nightmare has unfolded in the remote port.

The game’s setting is simple but immersive. Those with even a little memory of how Ridley Scott envisioned far-future space travel will feel right at home traversing the corridors of Sevastopol — and eventually its service ducts and air vents. When you enter the station, there is not a single person to greet you; however, they’ve left ample messages of doom scrawled on the wall for you, amid luggage strewn about, metal panels ripped out of place and eventually a fire burning from a ruptured gas vent. Despite its vastness, Sevastopol immediately feels claustrophobic, a feeling only exacerbated by oft-flickering lights and the fact that most doors and computer stations seem to be unpowered.

Eventually, you do start to find people — living and quite dead, tucked away in body bags — but they’re not happy to see you. It becomes the wise thing to do to avoid them altogether (unless you are achievement-hunting) as they are unpredictable, desperate and therefore dangerous. Worst of all, some of them are trigger-happy and as such are likely to attract your primary external tormentor — the xenomorph itself, well into its singular goal to terrify and slaughter Sevastopol’s remaining denizens one by one. Your eventual goal is to find your way to the crew who was to welcome you, uncover the flight recorder and get the hell out.

Although first-person, the game is anything but a shooter. Your default walk speed is slow, and the run control is a hold rather than a toggle. Movement is both deliberate and precious, as the xenomorph is chaotic and ceaseless. True to its survival horror basis, “Alien: Isolation” is not a game of fighting off the bastards, but of quietly slinking around Sevastopol in the shadows, trying to activate enough systems to communicate with your transport ship and using subterfuge to throw the alien off the hunt for a few seconds at a time — and I mean that last bit quite literally.

The concept of being ceaselessly stalked is not new to survival horror. One perk of completing some versions of “Resident Evil” is that you can activate an unkillable zombie that follows you from room-to-room. The 2002 remake of “Resident Evil” adds to the game several periods of being chased by a grotesque, unkillable girl through tight corners amid other typical zombies. The tyrants Mr. X and Nemesis antagonize the players throughout Resident Evils 2 and 3, although can be stunned to varying degrees.

“Alien: Isolation” elevates this trait and constructs an entire game around the premise.

You do acquire a revolver (and, at some point, a shotgun), but in tribute to the Resident Evil games of yore, ammo is scarce. You’ll do everything to avoid firing the weapons, but unlike the pioneer games of survival horror, it’s because the trade-offs are so steep. They’re loud and the humans you’re firing them at have better aim than you do. If they don’t kill you, the xenomorph will hear you and simply silence you all.

Instead, you have to be crafty, scavenge for parts and cobble together noisemakers, smoke bombs and flashbangs as your tools. You’ll also have to get cheeky and rewire electrical panels to divert power from, say, air ventilation to the speaker system to create a room filled with smoke and noise feedback — good for confusing other people. The alien is impervious to damage, but is easily annoyed, distracted and pyrophobic — be sure to track down the bottles of Jack Daniels for Molotov cocktails. Rogue androids also roam around the space station and, on top of being more lethal, are much harder to take down. And with personal lighting limited to flashlight batteries or the occasional flare, have fun in the dark.

In terms of atmosphere, the game feels very much so like the first “Bioshock,” which itself borrows from survival horror elements. The destruction of Sevastopol as it orbits a gas giant is a slow, observable decay, as is Rapture gradually imploding and flooding at the floor of the Atlantic. Your allies are few, and you’ll have to rely on the frenzied sound of the inhabitants to navigate safely. Plots aside, there is no overarching directive in the game outside of “survive.”

Similar again to the Bioshock franchise (and also the Borderlands games), lore is developed via the lost tape medium, which can be found literally in tape recorders and also in various computer terminals strewn about. You can also learn more about your dead or expiring peers by tracking down ID tags around the station.

This is all a very long way to explain what makes the game uncomfortable.

The mechanic is that an invincible monster is constantly hunting you, and that you are to navigate your objectives while simultaneously evading it or confusing it. Running is nearly always foolish. You’ll often have to hide in lockers or storage containers, but if the thing is close enough, you have to hold your breath — a recipe for a noisy exhale. If the creature decides to enter the service ducts, good luck predicting where it will emerge.

One of the loading screens warns you that “hiding is only ever a temporary solution,” and it couldn’t be truer. You are constantly vulnerable throughout the course of the game, so craft items, access computer terminals or unlock a door at your own risk — they do not pause the game or give you a safety bubble. Navigating any area is an exercise of careful planning while retaining the need to spontaneously react in the fairly likely event something unpredictable happens. You’re unlikely to be found deep in a utility duct, and the plot does create a safe area at some point, but neither are particularly meaningful once you realize that there’s little gained by staying there.

Isolation may have been a name selected for illustrating the setting — a nearly derelict space station — but the more isolating aspect of playing the game is that as much as Amanda Ripley (and, vicariously, you) need the companionship and advantage of a team, you need to drive almost everyone away if you want to live. Instead of banding together in a crisis, people fragment off into groups who stick up their onetime neighbors over freeze-dried meals or batteries.

Even the controls seem designed to heighten anxiety. Using a wrench or blowtorch to get through locks involves a sequence of keys that can’t be done quicker. Other interactions typically involve mashing a key or two for several seconds, which helps recreate the urgency of frantically doing something quickly because it can’t be done quietly.

In spite of a relatively simple graphics palette and some inelegant human animations, the game is visually stunning and, in particular, has beautiful attention paid to its lighting effects. The score, which borrows from the titular film, is well crafted and the developers effectively timed a number of environmental noises to keep your heart rate up without falling back on jump scares.

Ultimately, despite the comparables, “Alien: Isolation” is really unlike any other game I’ve played. From essentially the minute you start to the end, you play the game with lingering tension and anxiety, which balance out your natural curiosity for what the hell happened in Sevastopol. Classic video games of the ‘90s asked the player to use muscle memory to power through stages. Here, you’re made to guess what might work and probably die a lot trying. When you do progress, it will probably have been done no less dangerously than before — sometimes you just get lucky.

As similar as it is mechanically to the classic Resident Evil games, one key departure is that unlike Capcom, the fine folks at Creative Assembly do not reward you for completing the game with, say, an infinite-round rocket launcher — nor should they, really. You’re left to either toy around with some DLC minigames or simply up the difficulty and do it all again.

And that’s just fine.