It’s One of the Greatest Games Ever, But I Don’t Think I Could Ever Play it Again

Though I desperately want to play it again

There are so many games for me that were one & done (played once, never played again). Most were because they were boring, just not that good, or I couldn’t get on with the controls and ran out of patience.

Recent open world Mad Max is a good example of one that grew tedious quickly, even with all the cool car upgrades. RDR2 was so dreadfully dull I gave up three hours into playing it.

But one game in my one & done list doesn’t really deserve to be there because of how I so desperately want to play it again. It wasn’t bad. On the contrary, it was actually one of the best games I’ve ever played.

It’s called Alien Isolation, and it’s potentially a game I may never play again because of what it did to my blood pressure and anxiety.

What is Alien Isolation?

Set between the first two Alien films: Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), you play Amanda Ripley — the daughter of the two film's main character Ellen Ripley — some 15 years after the events of the first film. That means Amanda is an adult in her late 20s, and working as an engineer near to where her mother went missing, when she hears that a space station has recovered the Nostromo’s black box.

She heads there to find it, only to discover the station silent and most of its human occupants gone.

The computer systems are shut down, the androids have gone haywire, and the only other humans aboard (aside from the crew who came with you) are armed scavengers. It’s no great spoiler to say that there is one xenomorph aboard. Just one? Yes, and there’s a caveat… while the humans and malfunctioning androids can be killed/destroyed, the xenomorph cannot.

As tantalising as it is to throw a bomb into a crowd of human scavengers then finish them off with the shotgun, that would mean certain death for you because those noises will draw the xenomorph. For most of the game, all you can do is distract it, hide under tables and in cabinets, escape, and scare off the xenomorph with fire (you can fashion Molotov cocktails and eventually acquire a flamethrower).

This is the claustrophobia and setting of Dead Space coupled with the gameplay of Splinter Cell.

You can hide in lockers occasionally, but simply being in the locker isn’t enough. One piece of advice the game keeps repeating is that hiding is only a temporary measure. If the xenomorph gets wind that you’re around, you are instructed to press other buttons to carry out minor actions such as holding your breath or standing at the very back of the locker, all the while Amada starts to pass out.

This is a stealth game where you collect spare parts to build everything, where dark corners are temporary friends but may also hide a threat. It’s a game where you want to get out of the room quickly because the xenomorph is a dozen paces behind you, but to move even a little quicker might mean insta-death.

Dare you?

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