How Alien Isolation Is Going All In On Authentic Sci-Fi Horror

In the above video, I speak to creative lead Al Hope after a two-hour hands-on preview session with Alien Isolation. The Creative Assembly is going all-in on recreating the horror experience of the original Alien film. It is slow, tense, and claustrophobic, interspersed with bouts of heart-pounding terror.

The game's single alien spends its time dynamically hunting you, crawling through air ducts and bursting out of ventilation shafts in unscripted search patterns. You have no weapons that can harm it, so you need to search the nooks and crannies of the damaged space station you're trapped on for crafting components. These can be fashioned into noisemakers, flares, and flash bombs--things that may distract the alien long enough for you to slip past and find somewhere safer to hide.

But these items aren't perfect, and neither is the '70s-style low-fidelity technology that the world of Alien Isolation is steeped in. The Creative Assembly took great care to recreate the look and feel of Alien, from the VHS-like visual artefacts on computer displays, to the way your motion tracker isn't precise and can experience glitches in confined areas--areas you'll be spending a lot of time cowering in. All of this communicates that technology isn't going to help you stop the alien--only your wits can.

Alien Isolation is releasing October 7 for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.