What I love about Alien Isolation

This post is inspired by a video Superbunnyhop did about Alien's influence on video games, you should watch it. What I love about Alien Isolation and what many seem to forget about it is that it isn't Aliens (The second film in the series). In many ways the best part of Alien Isolation is what it isn't. It isn't a shooter, it doesn't have a common save system, it doesn't have jump-scares (Or at least not very many) and it doesn't rely on scripted scares.
The Creative Assembly team has done an excellent job in managing to translate the small scale, slow and intense drama of the original film in a game. This is something games don't generally do exceptionally well. Many games have more in common with the second Alien film in this regard. They feel like they require big set-pieces, loads of enemies and a fast pace to keep the player constantly stimulated. I'm talking about games in general here, but this applies particularly to modern horror games, or the lack thereof.
Creative Assembly have managed to ignore this trend of high tempo, set-piece driven and innumerable enemy count game-play in favour of something far more potent. They have exchanged enemy count for enemy intelligence and potency. The main source of fear is something that is tangibly in-game, organic and reactive. This has been done before, but only in an incredibly rudimentary way due to the restrictions of technology. This game is a triumph for Alien games but more importantly a triumph for horror games.
Now it isn't the best horror game, I wouldn't call it excellent. For one thing all of the games strongest techniques are abandoned in the latter half of the game, where it devolves back into the traditional Aliens game in which we walk around looking at scripted events trying to shoot multiple enemies. How many times have you boringly had to shoot those scurrying hand-like creatures in other games?
What else it does badly is the more traditional areas. Characterization, pacing, repetitiveness and the writing in general is bad. Ripley I think is the biggest sin of this game. She is boring, she says nothing, she does as ordered, gets taken advantage of and is totally cliche. In what way does this honor the greatness that was Ellen Ripley's character? This is by far the worst part of the translation from film to game, and the article on Polygon which states that Amanda Ripley is the best female protagonist since the original Alien is one of the stupidest things I've ever read in game journalism.

A short analysis of Loneliness (The game)

Poetry in motion


http://www.necessarygames.com/my-games/loneliness/flash

Did you give up; Lose hope? Lose hope, find it, then have it crushed again? Were you mad or indifferent? You probably learned a little about yourself during this experience, about how you react or would react to perceived or real isolation. But whatever your attitude is, the end gets trickier and trickier to see until it's completely blotted out and you lose your way. You lose your control and slip deeper and deeper until you finally find the end of the road. Either way, real or delusional loneliness becomes blackness.

Loneliness is the best representation of mechanics with meaning we have at this time. The entirety of this game is purely representational(Apart from the message at the end which grounds the experience in reality). Represented mainly in motion. It's a feeling. It's the video game equivalent of poetry.

These groups of blocks mostly seem to be having a joyous time. They spin around and are structured in many different ways. Like real human people and their relationships. And you come along and mess everything up. These blocks are repulsed by you, literally repelling away and disappearing. Some of these blocks were desperately trying to find each-other, but you ruined that too.

The second most important part of this game, the music, is a very good representation too. It embodies both sadness and suspense. This is critical to the feeling of the game. The music goes through the not-quite-the-same cycles all the time, like the player is probably doing. As you go past the many groups the music gets higher in tempo and then straight down again in slightly different ways as you pass the slightly differently structured social groups.


This game is pure meaning and metaphor, it is gaming's own poetry.