Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 64

Hello everyone, first off don’t worry this is a spoiler
free review of the stealth survival horror game, Alien:
Isolation. The game was developed by The Creative
Assembly, Sega and 20th Century Fox and released
on a wide variety of gaming platforms in October
2014. The story takes place 15 years after the events
of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien and 42 years prior to
the events of the film’s 1986 sequel Aliens directed by
James Cameron. You are playing as Amanda Ripley,
daughter of Ellen Ripley, the main protagonist from
Alien. I don’t want to focus too much on the story line
in case you have not played the game yet but overall, you have to go to a rundown space station called
Sevastopol to retrieve the flight recorder from Ellen
Ripley’s ship and following the Murphy’s law of any
good sci-fi horror, as you as you arrive at the station,
everything goes to hell.

as I have, it’s just routine, avoid getting seen and then
shot. At first I had a hard tim e with them but after a
while I realized they are the easiest enemies to get past
and are the weakest to kill as well. Or if you like to be
like me and play puppet master, you can cause them to
meet their demise by the main antagonist, the Alien.

In the game you must rely on stealth to get past your
enemies, if you have a weapon you have the choice
of fight or flight but trust me, flight is the best option.
You are not the only human on the station, there are
survivors as well and they’re not friendly! There is no
scare factor with the Human antagonists because if
you’ve been playing first person shooters for as long

What makes the Alien scary is how fast it is and unpredictable its actions are, as Hudson from Aliens said
“They’re just Animals!” which what makes it scary,
with Human enemies you can predict what they will
do and they talk, but with a creature like the Alien,
it doesn’t talk and its movements are so random you
don’t know how long it will be gone before deciding

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Once you finally meet the Alien (and you play with
headphones on) every little sound you hear makes you
paranoid because you don’t know where the Alien will
suddenly drop down from, yes, DROP down (I’ve died
a few times when the Alien literally dropped in behind
me.) at first all my childhood fears of the creature
came flooding back, I tried not to make any sounds
when I knew it’s around, I got to the point that my
strategy was to literally crouch down the entire game
so I would not make any sounds walking!