10 Years Later, I Think I Finally Understand Alien: Isolation Hate--But It's Still A Masterpiece

Alien: Isolation celebrated its 10-year anniversary on October 6, 2024. Below, we reexamine how the despite its great ideas, the game may not have communicated its expectations clearly enough.

It's been a decade and I'm still mad about Alien: Isolation.

I'm mad that one of the best horror games that exists, if not one of the finest video games ever, has been met with relative obscurity rather than accolades over the last decade. It's a travesty that we never saw an Isolation sequel (mobile game notwithstanding) to tease out more of its story and characters, create more worlds using its phenomenal take on the aesthetic of the 1979 film, and further develop the often-groundbreaking and always-terrifying elements of its design. Alien: Isolation deserved better.

I tend to replay Isolation every year or two, and I revisited it again this year on Hard mode. At this point, I'm pretty good at Isolation, retaining just enough from past runs to deftly handle a gang of murderous androids or complete a power system restart puzzle quickly and efficiently, before enemies have a chance to react.

But then there's the alien.

Isolation's creature remains a legitimately frightening masterwork of AI monster design. Towering but agile, unstoppable and intensely intelligent, it's almost as scary for me now as it was in 2014--and when I feel like firing up the excellent, horrifying Nightmare difficulty, it still hits those heights. Even 10 years later, the alien is an incredible force, dominating the tight confines of Sevastopol space station in every sense. The thing is terrifying. I love it.

The alien's behavior design is famously complex and intricate, and because of how smart and capable it seems as you're playing, my runs even 10 years later are phenomenally tense experiences. It's a testament to that design that the game remains so engaging on repeat playthroughs, not because there's some satisfying game-feel element like snapping headshots on enemies or skillfully navigating environmental puzzles, but because of how it actually captures the feeling of being hunted by the universe's greatest killing machine.

Another thing I do every few years when revisiting Alien: Isolation is to pop around to various games media sites and read reviews from Isolation's launch, because while they also make me mad, their perspectives are fascinating. Ten years ago, GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd gave Alien: Isolation a 6, complaining about frustrating bouts of trial and error and illogical mechanics. IGN's Ryan McCaffrey went lower with a 5.9, writing that he died hundreds of times.

If you are in this situation, you already messed up somewhere.

As mentioned, I am pretty good at Alien: Isolation at this point, so it isn't precisely fair to compare my experience to those of reviewers playing the game for the first time ahead of release. But just for the sake of contrast: On my most recent run, I had so many of each craftable item that I couldn't carry any more of either the items themselves or the components to make them. I finished the game with my flamethrower completely full. I died maybe four times in 15 hours.

My point here is not to shame or dismiss either VanOrd or McCaffrey, of course--especially as a game critic, I'll be the first to tell you that their experiences, and any experiences with a game, are valid, and their assessments are well-reasoned. I keep revisiting their reviews and others because my experience is so vastly different from theirs and I can't help wondering why.

I recently delved into some YouTube commentary videos on Alien: Isolation, including a few that aimed to analyze the workings of the alien's driving, highly complex artificial intelligence. Some dealt with whether the alien was "fair," if it lived up to Creative Assembly's claims that the creature only used information it gleaned from its senses to chase down the player, or if the computer gave it an additional leg-up to make it artificially more frightening or more deadly.

This is a complaint I've heard over the years from other players--some people really don't like the alien. They find its unpredictability to be cheap instead of terrifying, complaining about things like the tension-driving systems that keep it lightly tethered to the player (you know, so it doesn't wander off and leave you alone to complete simple puzzles with nothing scary going on). Some claim that it reacts as if it knows where you are even though it shouldn't have that information. People find the game difficult, but for many, it's not difficult in a fun and engaging way.

The first time you use the flamethrower on an android, it should be harrowing as you realize how ineffective it is. There should not be a second time.

What struck me while watching one video, as the essayist complained about the alien AI, was that the player just wasn't very good. A moment in which the alien unexpectedly spun away from a distraction to chase them down, for example, happened because the player was incautious and noisy, expecting a noisemaker to keep them safe and failing to be stealthy as a result. In my view, the alien was responding correctly as it heard the player's loud footsteps and catching them out, and it only seemed cheap and unfair if you didn't see the mistake.

I started to think, what if some of the people who panned Alien: Isolation disliked it because they were bad at it--and didn't know it?

In his video essay on Fallout 3, critic Harry "H. Bomberguy" Brewis uses the term "play conditioning" to describe an essential element of game design that sometimes can go unnoticed and under-discussed. This is the idea that the game teaches you what to expect from it, not through tutorials, but through the experiences the design facilitates. Brewis's example in Fallout 3 is about hacking computers--after investing your character points in various skills, the first time you find a computer in Vault 101, you can hack into it. However, if you spend even a couple of seconds investigating the area around the computer, you immediately find the password needed to crack it.

Brewis argues that what Fallout 3 is trying to teach players here is that problems can have multiple solutions, and that investing in a skill can give you one solution, but patience and diligent exploration can reveal another. What he says it actually teaches, however, is that if you spent skill points on hacking, you wasted them, because passwords are nearby and easily found. The player has a moment where they feel stupid for investing in hacking, and they're conditioned not to do that anymore.

The purpose of these moments is tension--every time you are looking at a computer, you are unable to look for the alien.

Thinking about Alien: Isolation, elements of play conditioning might have been part of its ultimate downfall for some players. The password thing was actually something VanOrd complained about in his review, too--every computer had its password taped right next to it, and every camera had the junction box to disable it conveniently positioned beneath it.

What that criticism fails to recognize, though, is that Isolation wasn't testing your ability to figure out passwords or track down junction boxes. Those computers force you to stand there, your attention on the screen, as you try to quickly tap in the password while your heart slams in your throat, because your guard is down and your senses are hindered. You're stuck rewiring a junction box for a few achingly long seconds, totally exposed, able only to hope nothing is sneaking up on you. In just about every other game, hacking into a computer is about the skill of cracking the code, whether finding it through investigation or mechanics. Here, the computer exists purely to make you vulnerable. And maybe the problem was, fundamentally, that Alien: Isolation failed to make that clear.

There's a room early on in Alien: isolation, before the alien is even really part of the story, that always kills me. You run into a human trying to hack an elevator, she spots you immediately and fires a few gunshots in your direction, and then runs off to get her friends, who then return and start hunting for you. This happens in a confusing, two-story space where it's tough to tell where you're trying to go and where the humans who come back to search for you are staked out in the room. I die here almost every time, and a friend playing for the first time this week immediately complained about it.

This room legitimately sucks, but at least the second time you come through, you can get some revenge.

What does this room teach new players? Mostly that enemies are preternaturally good at spotting and killing you, and you won't be able to do much about it. It happens before you're able to defend yourself or have the tools you need to navigate around searching opponents. There's not much cover and not much clarity of what to do. It doesn't effectively show you how to use your surroundings to help you escape detection or that you have to move quickly based on what you hear around you; it conditions you that stealth will be haphazard and that the rules are fickle. It's completely at odds with the rest of Alien: Isolation, but it sets a tone for the rest of the game.

Much of the alien's behavior and many of its tells you just have to learn, immersive sim-style, and that could be where that feeling of trial-and-error comes in for some people. If you throw a noisemaker to draw the alien away, but then don't realize it can hear you as you scramble off in the other direction, you don't learn that you need to move more quietly in those moments; you learn that your tools aren't reliable. You think the alien won't react the way you expect and that you could die at any time. You feel like your actions don't matter in the face of the alien's unpredictability.

The alien itself is also an element that's counterintuitive compared to what you learn playing other stealth and horror games. The creature never walks set patrol routes and can sometimes change direction or drop out of vents seemingly at random, making its behavior hard to predict--but that's highly at odds with just about every other game in the genre at that point.

As the game notes, hiding is only ever a temporary solution. Wait for an opening and then go, or you will have a really bad time.

Outlast, another great horror game with similar run-and-hide mechanics, came out less than six months before Alien: Isolation, and it was a game that required understanding its enemies' repetitive walking routes so you could slip around and past them. It's an example of a gameplay approach that players had gotten used to over the course of years. That's a lot of habit to break when facing the alien, and even more so when you don't understand exactly what you're dealing with. Not knowing how the game expected you to deal with that unpredictability might be why some players describe much of their experience of Isolation as waiting in lockers for the alien to completely leave an area--the absolute worst, most boring way, and least effective way to play the game. No wonder those people hated it.

I still think Alien: Isolation is an incredible game, and we're finally starting to see other developers building on what it did so well 10 years ago. Resident Evil 7 moves the franchise to a first-person viewpoint to create a campier, incredibly scary take on similar ideas. Amnesia: The Bunker is essentially a tighter, somewhat smaller Alien: Isolation, using a lot of the same elements to brilliant effect. The multiplayer entry into the Outlast franchise, The Outlast Trials, also pulls on the same threads with roaming, unpredictable murderers, especially on higher difficulties.

But something for developers that's worth learning from Alien: Isolation is that you can make a game that's great to play, but there may still be factors within the game and outside of it that work against it, and understanding those elements is important to how we think about games and how games are made. The problem is not that players needed to "git gud," and gatekeeping games through difficulty does nothing but make games weaker and less interesting for everyone. Alien: Isolation isn't that difficult mechanically--but it can be frustrating when you don't understand it. Maybe the takeaway is that, sometimes, games need to do more to make themselves understood.

The alien is an incredible feat of game design, but it can require time, patience, and observation to understand.

So 10 years later, I'm still mad Alien: Isolation didn't set the gaming world on fire. But I think I understand it, and the other people who haven't enjoyed it, a little better. It's still a masterpiece and quite possibly my favorite game of all time. You should still play it. But as with many games, it might require patience, observation, and a little work to play Isolation the way it was meant to be played. I hope we see more games draw from what makes Isolation great, and I hope those who are influenced by it learn from its mistakes, too.

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