Outstaying your welcome: Alien Isolation

I hated playing The Evil Within. I quit after two or three passes with the first encounter and its unfriendly checkpoints.  It felt tired and forced, and held back vital mechanics from the player in favor of cheap scares.  It annoyed me and did not value my time.

I reminded myself of this the 10^th time I tried to make it through the medical section in Alien:Isolation.

Directed and linear to fault, Isolation has enormous issues, especially in the last third of the game which are offset magnificently by the first third of the game. Playing as Amanda Ripley, the grown daughter of the still vacu-frozen Ellen Ripley from Alien, the story takes place on a near derelict space station that is being decommissioned.  With art and sound direction that feels like the original Alien was rubbed up and down over the developer’s bodies, mood and tone are established quickly and retained for the most part.

The Sevastopol station leans heavily on the design of the refinery towed by the Nostromo in Alien, with towering spires and spikes sticking out of everything. On in the inside, inexplicably large open holes dot the ceilings and the walls are lined with circular vents that iris open.  Wall-grids are backlit creating the illusion of light against massive negative spaces of shadow. In short it looks great. It looks right.

The station thrums and pulses with the film’s atonal sounds that create tension on their own, delivering inescapable claustrophobia, like an empty active auto factory. Machinery is alive everywhere but little else is. Sparse human survivors run or attack when they see Amanda, desperate to hold on long enough for a rescue that is never coming.

In survival horror tradition, resources are thin though there are crafting materials everywhere if you take time to look.  Amanda picks up blueprints throughout the game, expanding the repertoire of jury rigged defenses that as much distraction as weapon.  Early on,  a locked door hints at a specific kind of torch i.e. the one she didn’t just get, that is needed to cut through the lock. Backtracking through environments is a thing.

Man is it a thing.

The opening hours are tense and exciting, as Amanda works her way deeper into the station, trying to reconnect to the ship orbiting outside that brought her here.  All of the enemies on the station are revealed, average loud dumb gun toting humans, ultra creepy near invulnerable androids and finally the titular alien.

Revealed in a cut scene and soon followed in gameplay in the dreaded medical section I was immediately terrified by the Alien’s presence.  Booming footfalls or rumbling vents announced it and drips of drool would hint at why lie ahead. I was riveted.

I was riveted until I died or backtracked through medical enough times to memorize it and really watched the Alien’s behavior.  It thumped past me and I drank in the detail and I died enough that I stopped caring. I stopped being afraid of the plodding Alien and hid and crouched and kept quiet, so much so that by the time I had completed what I thought was the ending I was barely annoyed.

I realized then I wasn't even halfway into the game. There would be pointless side missions that could be replaced with a cut scene and lose nothing.

More and more I backtracked and had a sudden realization that it seemed like sequences were created from a cool visual concept and reverse engineered to create that moment, and thus were impervious to subversion by the player.

Isolation betrays its own conceit late in the game, having abandoned the Alien as enemy, placing hordes of androids instead, only to reintroduce the Alien. But by then it’s too late. Amanda has enough weapons and tools to keep her out of harm’s way.  The Alien has been effectively neutered as a threat as have the androids.

When it ends, when it finally ends, it betrays the conceit of the film so spectacularly one wonders why the slavish devotion in all other areas. It falls to the same pitfalls Alien: Colonial Marines fell to in trying too hard to retro-fit canon when it isn’t completely ignoring canon. (ie. Why name her Amanda if Aliens is outside the source material, but then why ignore Aliens if her name is Amanda?)

Isolation is ambitious and visually stunning, often incoherent and in love with its set pieces, and too long by half.