In Defence of Alien: Isolation

ign.com:

Across the many stories set in the Alien universe, there’s evidence to suggest the xenomorphs are part of some kind of hivemind that, at some level, operates as a collective consciousness. The same cannot be said for IGN: This website is the work of a large group of individuals with varied – and sometimes directly conflicting – perspectives on pretty much every single game. But a review, by its very nature, can only reflect the perspective of one person. A decade ago, our own Ryan McCaffrey gave Alien: Isolation a 5.9 in his review, noting that, among other things, its genuine scares were “diluted by repetition and padding.” He wasn’t alone in that reaction, and other major review outlets gave it similar scores for similar reasons. Today, approaching its 10th anniversary, I’m here to (once again) respectfully dissent and offer a different perspective: I love Alien: Isolation. It is one of my favourite games of all time. And, even after all these years, it remains a singular, terrifying triumph.

When Alien: Isolation arrived in 2014, I was working at a different website. As the year drew to a close, I wrote that I believed Creative Assembly’s take on survival horror was the best game of the year. I re-read that piece after recently replaying the whole campaign and found that everything I loved about it at launch remains what I love about it today.

The headliner of the whole event is, of course, the xenomorph itself: a landmark piece of enemy AI engineering. Creative Assembly somehow managed to turn lines of code into a creature that appears genuinely, terrifyingly alive. Despite operating almost entirely without a scripted sequence of actions, every encounter with it feels as though it was perfectly authored to generate maximum tension. The way it learns from your actions, such as investigating lockers after discovering you use them to hide, is truly unnerving.

On the ‘hard’ difficulty level, when the AI is firing on all cylinders, the xenomorph truly is the ultimate