Be Excellent To Each Other

So there's a new game in the Alien franchise coming out, and it's got a really interesting premise. Basically, the devs at Creative Assembly wanted to make a proper Alien horror game. Alien Isolation is survival horror title inspired by Ridley Scott's classic film where the xenomorph is a terrifying monster again instead of fodder for your pulse rifle, and for Isolation it's the xenomorph in the proper sense. You will be attempting to survive trapped on a station with only a single lethal alien that stalks and hunts you. It's a game about avoiding, hiding and fleeing rather than confronting. It's a meticulously faithful adaptation and expansion on the themes of the first film, and it's just the kind of big gamble this franchise needs right now after that other game...

Yes, unfortunately there's just no way of getting around that travesty you're all thinking of. However unfair it might be to the developers at Creative Assembly it's impossible to not bring up Aliens: Colonial Marines. While the industry certainly sees a fair share of bad releases every year, Aliens: Colonial Marines was a bit of a rarity. A high profile title made all the more well-known by its critical panning, of which at least some could be attributed to a feeling of betrayal from such a beloved franchise. If Colonial Marine had simply been some generic space marines versus aliens, it probably wouldn't have been as noteworthy.

It is refreshing then that the developers at Creative Assembly are so devoted to "making the Alien game we always wanted to play". It might initially seem off for a developer known for their PC strategy games to be making a survival horror on consoles as well no less, but Alien Isolation is a new team at Creative Assembly, separate from the Total War folks, that's been selected and poached from industry veterans.

Every aspect of the experience is grounded in the themes, design and aesthetics of the Scott's sci-fi film. The devs were really excited to finally show off what they've been working on in extended secrecy, no surprise given Colonial Marine's reception. Even our preview was handled a bit differently perhaps in response as well, as we were intentionally left in the dark and no shown trailers or images of the game. Our first experience was playing the game, and based on my brief time with it, the folks at Creative Assembly are absolutely nailing the correct feel for this game. It still remains to be seen how a few mechanics will pan out, and if the alien proves an interesting foe with repeated encounters, but I think there's no denying this is the closest we've gotten to an authentic Alien game.

The game's story picks up 15 years after first film. The Nostromo's flight recorder was recovered, after Ripley blew the ship up, and has been brought to a past-its-prime space station out on the fringe of human expansion. You play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley's daughter, who is still wondering what happened to her mother. Amanda and a team from the series' mega corporation Weyland Yutani travel to the station to retrieve the flight recorder and get some answers. The section we played was near the middle of the game, so the reveal of how a xenomorph got on the station is still a mystery.

The core gameplay is pretty straightforward. You explore the station in the first person, with a noticeable lack of any UI elements. Your tools are just that, tools not weapons. You've got a flashlight, motion tracker and a few other things you pick up along the way like a spot welder. There are crafting components scattered across the station for those diligent enough to collect them, though the final details of those mechanics are still in the works. We didn't get to see what could be made, but from speaking with the devs it sounds like the current plan was you'd be able to make various useful and consumable devices such as ways to distract the alien.

The motion tracker is your primary tool and works much the same way as seen in the films. However, this time around the motion tracker isn't simply taking over the on-screen mini-map. It's an item bound to the trigger that pulls it up into view. There's even this great dual nature to it, in that it both obscures a good deal of your view and the depth of field changes to blur out the background a little. So you must weigh the advantages of being able to see clearly or have a pin point location on the tracker.

The UI of the tracker supports and enhances the gameplay the most when the alien shows up. After cutting open a door and hacking a console, the alien crawls out of the ducts and begins hunting in the area for you. Rather than being pre-programmed to follow some kind of set patrol pattern, the alien is completely sense driven. The developers gave us a glimpse of the alien's AI flow chart and the massive jumble detailed how it smoothly transitions from stalking and investigating to attacking. According to the developers, it was important to implement the alien this way since it makes every encounter unique and ensures the alien behaves believably on screen for extended periods of time, as opposed to the 15 seconds that most enemies last in other games. You need to avoid being seen or heard to survive, which of course the game makes difficult by making your objective to open a well-lit airlock door.

I loved these great naturally occurring moments of gameplay where you duck into a locker to avoid being spotted, and the xenomorph comes right up to the vent searching for you. You're even prompted to push back away from the locker door and hold your breath in game, which may even catch you holding your breath for real as the alien looms inches away. Or maybe you know the alien is behind you, and you try and make a mad dash for the escape hatch, hearing it screech and tear after you just steps behind. I still want to see how well it holds up after you've repeatedly encountered it throughout the course of the whole game, but the alien is supposedly able learn and if you repeatedly use the game methods it will adapt to them.

Undeniably, the "character" of the xenomoprh and even the setting itself are considered paramount for the developers at Creative Assembly. The dedication into crafting some of these elements was simply staggering. The alien achieves its fluidity of motion through layers of animations being blended on top of each other, so it can be smoothly ramped up as it responds. Players will even be able to recognize when it transitions from stalking the area to keying into investigate something specific based only on how it moves and sounds.

Equal love was given to the space station in order to make it feel like it existed in the Alien universe. The approach was to give everything a low-fi version of the future, where the technology is certainly advanced but, frankly, a bit crap. Some of the areas look as if they've been pulled straight from the Nostromo, and in part this was achieved through implementing a simple rule. If a prop couldn't have been made in 1979, when the film was made, it didn't make it into the game. One dev even shared a humorous story about how the best way to create that analog feel for all the in game screens was to actually record to VHS and then record back over while messing with the cables and running magnets over it. Two TVs were destroyed during the making of the game.

It's this wonderful, and slavish, attention to detail that really makes the whole experience work. The look, feel and sound of the game all scream Alien. Look for Alien Isolation later this year on the PS4, Xbox One and PC. It might just be good enough to wash the terrible memory of Colonial Marines out of our collective consciousness forever.

Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Fifteen years after the events of Alien™, Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother's disappearance.

As Amanda, you will navigate through an increasingly volatile world as you find yourself confronted on all sides by a panicked, desperate population and an unpredictable, ruthless Alien.

Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive.

Alien: Isolation preview: hands-on with Creative Assembly's ambitious sci-fi horror

'Aliens' is a brilliant name for a movie sequel, when you think about it. It's a one-word pitch: remember that terrifying, implacable, unkillable alien monster? Well, now there are more of them. Let your imagination do the rest.

The trouble comes when the escalation doesn't stop. Almost thirty years after Aliens, Giger's monster isn't scary any more. It's cannon fodder, a fast zombie, a banana-headed moron. Games have finished off what the movies started, completing the xenomorph's transition from unknowable terror to lunchbox mascot. Lunchbox mascots, in the main, are not a credible threat.

I played Alien: Isolation for forty-five minutes, and in that time it did more to rehabilitate the alien in the part of my brain reserved for things that scare the shit out of me than any game since the original Aliens versus Predator. That's the highest praise I have to offer, and more than I'd thought to hope to get out of the reveal of a new Alien game, particularly one from a developer known for grand strategy games and the odd wonky fantasy action title.

But here we are. Creative Assembly have gone and made an Alien game that is actually scary, the game that you have probably been asking for in comments threads since Colonial Marines disintegrated on launch like a crap rocket made of blank cheques and publisher's tears.

There's still time for Alien: Isolation to stumble - I'll get to that later. First, though, I want to explore why the version I played worked as well as it did.
It's an Alien game, not an Aliens game

The key's in the name. Creative Assembly claim to have ignored every development in the franchise that followed Ridley Scott's movie. That means no pulse rifles, no jarheads, no queens, Praetorians, predaliens, and so on. It's an Alien game, and as such it's in competition pretty much exclusively with the (surprisingly excellent) Spectrum RPG from 1984.

You play as Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda, fifteen years after her mother blew up the Nostromo and vanished. In Aliens, Ripley wakes up from cryosleep to find that eighty years have passed and Amanda has died of old age; Isolation posits that her daughter spent at least some of that time being chased around a space station by a xenomorph of her own. Creative Assembly have tapped veteran comic book writer Dan Abnett for the story, who you may know from the Warhammer 40,000 novels or his work for Marvel.

Haunted by her mother's disappearance, Amanda Ripley joins Weyland-Yutani as an engineer, where she is approached by a company executive claiming to have located the Nostromo's black box recorder on a remote space station called Sevastopol. Amanda signs on with a mission to investigate, but becomes separated from her crew on arrival and finds the station itself in crisis, its surviving population panicked and fighting among itself. Also, there's an alien.

The alien won't always necessarily arrive at scripted moments.

Long-suffering aliens fans will be used to retcons, and while Isolation's plot is a convoluted excuse to call the protagonist 'Ripley' it nonetheless seems well-considered, particularly when compared to the far more egregious trampling of franchise history that Colonial Marines was guilty of. Importantly, the influence of the original film isn't simply in the plot: it's in the way the world is constructed, and the kind of things you're asked to do in it.

When I begin playing Amanda's inventory consists of a hacking tool, a handheld motion tracker, and an adjustable flashlight. I opt to never use the flashlight, ever, on the basis that if an acid-blooded horror wants to murder me I'd rather it didn't know where I was. The motion tracker must be raised by holding a button - there's no HUD - at which point a depth-of-field effect wipes out your peripheral vision. You can look at the tracker or look where you're going, but doing both at once is a challenge.

The first task I'm given is to find a blowtorch to open a locked bulkhead, and it's already scary. The environment is split between well-lit rooms and pitch-black corridors. The space-station groans and creaks constantly, like it's under stress, and a sudden thumping in the pipes above me makes me jump. I opt to crouch and crawl around as slowly as possible, just to be on the safe side.

This screenshot is very close to the version I played - it's a stunning-looking game.

There are lootable containers stashed away underneath tables and in dark corners, and in these I pick up bits of scrap that hint at a crafting system - not present in the demo, but heavily implied.

Eventually I make my way to a long, horseshoe shaped atrium with a few labs and a power generator. I am under no direct threat that I know of, but I play incredibly cautiously. The trepidation reminds me of playing Amnesia for the first time, knowing that the developers have something nasty planned but not knowing when or how it'll make itself known. As in that game, I take note of anywhere I might later hide - in this case, lockers dotted around the outer wall that I can leap into if I need to.

I power up the generators and run to complete my objective, which is to extract some information from a computer. Hacking it involves a minigame where, after dialing in the correct frequency - think Arkham Asylum's similar system - you have to match a geometric shape by keying in its component parts. It's a little gamey, but far less than hacking games tend to be. It's no Bioshock Pipe Dream, for one thing.

Then, the alien shows up.

The xenomorph is scary again

The alien uncoils from a vent and drops into the room. This part of the demo was a first-person cutscene, but I'm told that it won't be in the final game. Ripley dashes behind a desk and whispers "it's here!" The creature's tail lashes over the desk and rests between her legs, running up her thighs as it withdraws. It's really creepy, and creates the sense that my personal space is being invaded. There has always been an aspect of sexual threat to Giger's monster - it's got a penis for a head, guys - but it's not something that I'd expected to get out of a videogame. I am impressed, and kind of horrified, by the lengths that Creative Assembly have gone to re-fang the creature.

I gained control back as the Alien moved to leave the room. It's enormous - around eight foot tall - and much more upright than its counterpart in Aliens. It doesn't move particularly quickly unless it has seen you. This is a lone hunter, not a pack animal, and you pose no threat to it - it doesn't need to dash about looking for you. It takes its time.

From this point until shortly before the end, the demo was entirely unscripted. The alien hunts you using complicated AI routines, looking and listening for you - and learning from your behaviour - as you attempt to evade it. I spent a lot of time hiding in lockers, but after a while it started to figure out what I was doing. On multiple occasions I had to hold down a button to hold my breath as it attempted to figure out which locker I was in; later, it appeared to feign disinterest in my hiding spot before dashing back just as I was thinking about slipping away.

Creative Assembly have built their own engine for the game - there are a substantial number of former Crytek staff on the project - which has been a necessity, they say, to animate the alien in the way they wish. Its movements are dynamically hooked into the AI system in a way that is intended to communicate information to the player. If the alien is unaware of you it twitches, flicks at the environment, casts its head about. If it sees you it freezes, hunches, and closes the distance before you can blink. I saw very few instances of canned animation - it's unnervingly organic. A magic trick, certainly, but a good one.

I'd stopped taking notes at this point and become totally absorbed in surviving my encounter with this terrifying, intelligent opponent. I am about as inured to the xenomorph as anybody, but I'd started to believe in it again. I really, really didn't want to catch me.

It didn't, for what it's worth. I've got the dubious honour of being the only journalist to complete the demo without being caught, an achievement I attribute to a lifetime playing stealth games and an easy, natural cowardice. Others weren't so lucky. Being caught means being drawn into a first-person depiction of your death. That could mean a jaw closing around your face, a bony hand covering your eyes, or a short shock followed by the realisation that a bladed tail is protruding from your abdomen.

From audio to lighting and level design, CA have dug deep into the original film's materials to create Sevastopol. Its environments pay tribute the original sets through small details - hastily-abandoned clutter on a dining table, CRT monitors flickering with VHS-style advertisements, BBC micro keyboards. I admire the way that Creative Assembly have refused to stray from a 70s interpretation of the future: if you felt that Prometheus' holograms and magic science balls were an imposition on its low sci-fi purity, you'll be happy with the work on display here. The map that you access via the pause menu looks like it's running on a camcorder from the 90s. When you're relying on technology to keep you alive, it's all the more scary if that technology is a bit duff.

They have expanded on the original film's soundtrack with new compositions and built a dynamic audio system that emphasises different moods depending on the situation you find yourself in. Mid-chase you might hear only your own footsteps and breathing, but while exploring you'll be aware of the creaks and groans of the station itself. The alien has its own noises, from chitters to shrieks that, after many hours with the game, you should be able to use to interpret its level of awareness.

The game is bound for next-gen consoles, although the code I played was running on a PC. When I say that it's a PC game, though, I'm not just talking about technology - I'm talking about design. Scripted sequences will likely be part and parcel of the experience, but this is a systems-driven game at its heart. It's an alien simulator, and that's why it's so exciting. Like Amnesia, it's the kind of game that has the power to generate anecdotes. Creative Assembly say that after your first encounter with the alien, it won't simply spring into each level at a pre-scripted moment. It'll show up if you make too much noise or give yourself away in other ways, making this a game-long hunt in addition to a stage-by-stage one. If this works, it'll be tremendously impressive.

It's a hugely ambitious undertaking, and it's not surprising that it has taken seven years for Sega to lift the (admittedly porous) veil of secrecy surrounding the game. They're making something that has the potential to fall flat on its ass if the simulation doesn't quite hold together, but the playable code they demonstrated held together well. Truly ambitious triple-A games are rare, and usually exist in the form of promises made at hands-off press sessions many years prior to release. Truly ambitious triple-A games that are playable as soon as they're revealed are almost unheard of - the unicorns of big-budget game development. Based on what I've seen of it, I'm happy to say that Alien: Isolation is a unicorn. They can put that on the box, if they like.

The doubts I have are concerned with the game surrounding the slice I played. I wouldn't mind if the campaign was short if every section lived up the standard of the demo, but what will the rest be filled with? There's talk of craftable weapons and combat with non-alien opponents - not deal-breakers, necessarily, but they need to be handled carefully. The level design will need to be varied to prevent stealth from becoming repetitive or a chore. I've seen that the alien's AI is advanced enough to convince me on my first encounter, but it's a magic spell that could be shattered if it doesn't hold together over the course of a full-length game. Creative Assembly acknowledge and have answers to all of these concerns, but they amount to promises until we get our hands on a more substantial chunk of the game.

That's for the future, though. For the time being, it's nice to be excited by triple-A games development again. Hell, it's nice to be scared again.

Creative Assembly has announced a survival horror successor to Alien, Ridley Scott's brooding sci-fi classic
- Cara Ellison

The cleaners have started to come round the Creative Assembly offices. I walk into a stark white bathroom where a paper towel dispenser's guts hang open below the hand dryer. It looks sad. I walk towards a cubicle.

Suddenly, the hand dryer goes off by itself and my chest clutches in at me like a claw. The hand dryer switches itself on and off and on and off. Each time I remind myself there's no one there.

The cleaner pops in. 'Sorry!' she says, and potters off.

Even as I write this I still feel frightened. There's a kind of bleak dread I felt on the Sevastopol, the remote space station featured in Alien: Isolation. It's a dread that lingers. The game's environment is beautiful, enchanting even. But it is unsettling. And the… Alien. I don't really want to talk about the Alien. But I guess you're going to make me. It's like a black hole that the mind dances around.

Creative Assembly is taking on something so beloved that it seems like an unbearable weight. It is making a spiritual sequel to the 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien, with the full blessing of 20th Century Fox. Set 15 years after the Nostromo set off on its doomed voyage, the story follows Ripley's daughter, Amanda, now a Weyland-Yutani employee. The flight recorder of her mother's ship has been recovered. It is on the Sevastopol. She must investigate.

The development team all seem like fans of the Alien franchise, admirers in particular of Ridley Scott's scalding narrative of quiet existential dread and huge, looming monster horror.

I too am this keen; I studied the film for my degree, I wrote essays on its dark imagery, its feminist symbolism, its sexual terror. As I look around at the journalists being herded to and fro in the studio, I know each one of them at one point in their life has probably known a similar obsession with this sci-fi classic. From my little ivory perch, it seems too much, and wonder if the developers know what on Earth they have the reins of. They have hitched their wagon to a giant of our nerd culture and set off at a reckless yet admirable pace.

Many have stumbled before at this task. Gearbox's last dance with the Alien franchise - Aliens: Colonial Marines - was buggy and disappointing, and brought very poor reviews. But Creative Assembly has ransacked the 20th Century Fox archives where the 1979 film's historical debris has been stored. The developers describe in depth to me how much material they have been exposed to: the blueprints and measurements for the sets, the original concept art. Ron Cobb's 'Semiotic Standard for all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft' symbols sit on a screen like buttons I could press.
Alien: Isolation

Both the archive materials and the aesthetics of the movie been ingested and reproduced. The team talks excitedly of how they wanted to make Weyland-Yutani corporate videos look analogue, fuzzy. So they made the clips and recorded them on to old VHS machines, then bashed them around with magnets until when played back they skipped and blurred. The audio designers tell us about how they found unlabelled reels in the 20th Century Fox Alien archives that turned out to be hours of cockney sound designers making weird sound effects. They took the entire original soundtrack and rerecorded it with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, some of whom were present the first time the music was recorded with original composer Jerry Goldsmith.

It's impossible not to be excited and feel crippled by the scope of it at the same time. They're trying to recreate the sort of black magic that you feel could only have happened under the light of a certain mysterious constellation, and only under the hand of Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, and HR Giger. So I wouldn't want to be them. But if there's anyone who could make this work, it's Creative Assembly.

"When she left Earth, Ellen Ripley promised her daughter Amanda she would return home for her 11th birthday," explains the press release. "Amanda never saw her again.

"In order to uncover the truth about her mother, Amanda is forced to confront the same terrifying thing that separated them."

The idea is to survive when you know it is unlikely that you will. Watching the original 1979 film, you notice how silence is used to unsettle, to create a sense of waiting, of dread, and of uncertainty. Creative Assembly have noticed too. To wake in the game on the Sevastopol, in the belly of a place so like the Nostromo, the vast universe peering back at you through the portholes and from behind dust motes, it's overwhelming at first. The doors are familiar thanks to 20th Century Fox's set designers meticulously recording their shape and size. The gentle flutter of a familiar Jerry Goldsmith-penned flautist drifts notes over your shoulder. Everything looks as if 20th Century Fox merely left the fully functioning Nostromo drifting in space until Creative Assembly opened it back up one day and rearranged some rooms and pickups so it has became more like a puzzle. The level designers tell me a large part of the game is performing tasks under duress of fear, solving puzzles in an environment where you know your movements draw attention to you.

Press to bring up the motion tracker: there is no green blip on the radar. Your destination is indicated on the top of the device. But, you realise, that when you look at the motion tracker, the rest of your vision blurs. This is the key to your survival: the dilemma of knowing. Do you know where it is? Or can you see where it is? Do you look at the device, trusting it's far away? Or don't you want to know?

You slowly make your way through the abandoned remains of the dead crew, picking up fuel, tools, a torch. All the while, very little sound. The hum of strings or a rumble of drums sometimes. Sometimes those flautists try to brush past your ears and you feel alone. You see that little red weighted bird toy, pecking away at nothing on the dinner table. The dinner table that looks like the one you remember in the film was where John Hurt… Gave birth.

Something moves and you think this is it. But there is nothing on the tracker. It is the little bobbing toy, sitting by a light, casting a shadow.

Being Ripley

You press to cut open the hatch so you can open the door. I glance at my own hands on the game controller. They are pale, long thin fingers, no nail polish, chewed nails. Amanda Ripley's hands too are like this. They look like my hands and they are cutting open a door. I am much more touched than I'd like. In fact, there's a real sense of relief. They are her hands. They look like my hands. This is an odd sensation. Perhaps the game has faith in my ability to survive this nightmare.

Something happens. Everything goes wrong. This wing is breaking apart; and now there's a green blip on the tracker. The alarms are going off, a fire alarm mixed with an air raid siren. It's closing on me. They tell me the key is to go slow: this is the risk and reward mechanism they know is against all human nature. They tell me it can't see me if I go slow. They tell me if it sees me it's lethal.

It's on my radar. It's far across the room. I don't want to look at it. It's tall, black by the shadows, it stalks the compartments of the space station slowly until it senses my movement. There is a locker over there on the right. I run to it and shut myself in. And I sit there, the lights flashing and the alarms picking at me and I bring up the motion tracker: it is half a metre away. A quarter. A centimetre.

Through the slits I can see its dainty shark teeth in the horrible silver grin, the shine of the lights on its elongated black skull. It's looking at me. I press to hold my breath. I pull back on the stick to lean away from the locker door. It's going to rip me out of here, I think. It's going to smash my skull back into my brain.
Alien: Isolation

Finally, it leaves. My vision is blurry. My motion tracker suggests its stalking pattern has gone back to normal; it is moving away from me. Satisfied, I get out of the locker and feel sheepish for hiding and I start to walk towards my destination on the tracker.

The blip comes back, rounding on me. I should go slow, I think. No sudden movements. The blip gets closer. Go slow, I say to myself. Slow. Baby steps. Slower. But it's right behind me. It's right behind me. I can hear its feet on the floor. It's coming here.

I can see the door. I can see the door. If I run I can make it. I'm going to do that thing that you know you can't do but I feel like the goal is right there.

I run. My hands grab the door release.

The tail plunges through my stomach - Amanda's stomach - whatever - and the screen goes black.

"It can see you if you move quickly," one of the developers says.

Yes, I think. Well done you bastards. Well done.

Prediction: this will be terrible. When will you Alien fanboys ever learn?

The first two films were great - let's leave it there.

most games these days aren't difficult because gamers are saps that jack a game in after getting stuck a couple of times.

I'd like the hear from Silent Elk.

If it's a modern remake of this:



...then I'll be very happy.

I hate to agree with Myp, but Myp's right. As sure as any Ben Stiller film is not funny in the slightest, this will be a shit game.
.

HR Giger's apartment?

Tropic thunder was awesome. Shut up

Also: Dogeball.

Weaver, 'Alien' cast reprising roles in new game

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Sigourney Weaver and the cast of "Alien" are virtually returning to the starship Nostromo.

The actress who portrayed unflappable officer Ellen Ripley in the "Alien" film franchise is reprising her role in "Alien: Isolation," an upcoming video game set after the events of the original 1979 film. Weaver, who recorded new dialogue for the game, says she picked up right where she left off as tough-as-nails Ripley in filmmaker Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece.

"It was eerie how quickly it happened," Weaver told The Associated Press during a recent interview. "Honestly. I had to start with this sort of sign-off, 'This is Lieutenant Ripley of the starship Nostromo.' You know, that paragraph. I felt like no time had passed. It was really strange, actually. If anything, it was more affecting to me to read it again 35 years later."

The bonus "Crew Expendable" and "Last Survivor" levels, which will be available to those who pre-order the game, will allow players to portray Nostromo crew members Ripley, Dallas (Tom Skerritt) or Parker (Yaphet Kotto) as they explore the doomed ship and coordinate their efforts with Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) and Ash (Ian Holm) to lure the menacing alien into the airlock.

If there's Joansy DLC, that'd certainly explain why none of the lights in the game work properly.

There's been far too much pain with the last few Alien games to make me want to preorder this without seeing some reviews first.

Exclusive pre-order content, you say?

I can hear the alien breathing.

I’ve played lots of videogames, lots of run-and-gun shooters in which I happily charge down a corridor into certain death. Not this time. I’ve got my back pressed against the wall of an abandoned spaceship, and I’m inching down a hallway, my head darting left and right, looking for danger everywhere.

And I wonder, is this the one? Is this the Oculus Rift demo where I rip the headset off my face and bolt, terrified, out of the room?

I don’t get scared by horror movies or horror videogames. Sure, you can startle the hiccups out of me with a well-timed jump scare, but that only proves my lizard brain is firing on all cylinders. For the most part, I feel a pronounced disconnect between the frightening scenario onscreen and the safety of my living room. I don’t understand how some of my friends cannot bear to even pick up the controller and walk down a hallway in Resident Evil.

So it came as quite a surprise when I found myself so truly on edge that I almost lost it while playing Sega’s Alien: Isolation demo on Oculus Rift. The game, shown at E3 this year, is a custom VR prototype based on the survival horror game coming to PC and consoles October 7. More than that, though, it’s another compelling demonstration of how Oculus Rift has the potential to make gaming so immersive that the fantasy becomes reality.

Sega won’t say whether it plans to make the Oculus version a full-fledged consumer product, but it would be crazy not to. I’d played VR demos in which I truly believed I had been transported, but also demos where I felt like I was watching a bad movie on a really huge screen. Alien: Isolation was very much the former. The clever hook of the console game—exploring a lonesome world inhabited only by you and a lone alien, which you spend the entire game avoiding—is a perfect fit for Oculus.

“Like everyone else, we got very excited by the idea of Oculus Rift when it was first going into the Kickstarter,” said Al Hope, creative lead of developer The Creative Assembly’s console division. His team already was working on Isolation when Oculus launched its Kickstarter drive two years ago, and it seemed the two would work well together. Several Creative Assembly developers backed the crowdfunding drive, and they got Isolation running on Rift as soon as their initial development kits arrived.

Sitting down for the demo, I endured the now-familiar ritual of having an Oculus rep place the development kit over my head before clamping a pair of headphones over my ears. And then it began.

Suddenly, I’m walking down a quiet, seemingly deserted hallway on an abandoned spaceship. The demo runs on DK2, the latest version of the Oculus development hardware, so it is clean, vivid, smooth. Lifelike, in other words, and utterly believable.

I’m admiring the steel grey detailing of the hallway, the hum of the distant machinery reverberating through the ship, and how it all feels a bit like a VR version of Metroid Prime when something catches my eye. Uh, is that a dead body at the end of the hall? Yes. Yes, it is. I start getting anxious: Is this guy going to come back to life and jump-scare me? How close do I want to get? I approach him, cautiously. I find myself suddenly worrying about what might be behind me.

“Hey, turn on your flashlight,” the Oculus rep says, just loud enough to break reality into this alternate world. Like a moron I do. Holy crap now there’s light shining on the dead guy’s face. He’s slumped against a console, his vacant eyes staring ahead down the hallway I’d just walked. I don’t like looking at this. It’s a queasy, uncanny sensation. I move on, more slowly.

The Rift added a level of interaction and immersiveness to Alien: Isolation that even its developers did not expect. There’s a crate in the hallway. As in console games, I can press a button to crouch behind it. I don’t think to do so, but Hope told me later that I could have lifted my butt just a bit, elevating my head and peering over the crate without without giving away my position.

“You can just, millimeters over the top of the environment, peek at the world around you,” he said. More such opportunities revealed themselves to Hope and his team as they play-tested their game with Oculus added in. A pile of massive concrete pipes strewn about a construction area provide a measure of cover in the console game, but Oculus lets you lean in and peer through individual pipes. You can hide in lockers like a frightened nerd in the console game, but Oculus lets you lean toward the vents in the door to glimpse the hallway beyond. While crawling through an air vent, you can crane your neck to look around the corner.

These aren’t features Creative Assembly deliberately programmed into the game’s design—they simply happened once they dropped Oculus support into their existing code. As they come upon these fortuitous accidents, the team is polishing them up so they work even better. “It’s a really physical experience,” Hope says.

I was about to learn just how true that is.

I INCHED SIDEWAYS DOWN THE CORRIDOR, MY HEAD DARTING LEFT AND RIGHT, SCANNING FOR THREATS.
After I determined the dead body was not going to do anything, I saw something that surely was: H.R. Giger’s unmistakable alien, wandering the hall in search of prey. In search of me.

For now, it didn’t notice me. But I was on alert. I was looking everywhere for an escape route. I wanted to be anywhere but here, inside a spaceship with it. My brain started fighting itself. I had to consciously remind myself it wasn’t real, it was just a game. And in that moment I started to think about the videos I’ve seen of grown men playing horror games on the Rift and tearing the headset off in terror. I contemplate what would happen if I did exactly that.

I continue down the hallway. It’s no longer the casual saunter I’d so easily affected when the demo began. My back is to the wall, and I am inching down the corridor, trying not to make the slightest sound, my head darting left and right, scanning for threats. And then it happens: The alien finds me. I turn to my left to see him skittering toward me on all fours.

I didn’t think to run, and wouldn’t have gotten far if I had. It raised a spindly hand, claws sharp as razors, and brought it down. Game over.

I removed the headset, calmly, and pondered what I’d just experienced. After getting over my initial feeling of accomplishment over having mostly kept my cool, I was just blown away by how quickly and thoroughly Isolation on Oculus had pulled me into the experience, and shifted that experience from “hey, cool, virtual reality!” to something approaching actual fear.

“It’s really interesting, going to watch people play and seeing them initially look around quite naturally, being interested in the environment,” said Hope. “And then as the alien gets closer, you see their body physically react. They become tense. And then when the alien does ambush them, they reel back physically in their seats.” One player, he said, upon being attacked by the alien, threw their head back in a desperate attempt to avert their eyes from the carnage.

And yes, they have had testers rip off the Rift, throw it across the room, and run out screaming.

And yes, they have had testers rip off the Rift, throw it across the room, and run out screaming.

I guess there are people out there who are that feeble-minded. Unless every story ever about people running out of cinemas showing The Exorcist was just made up.

Sounds amazing. You wouldn't catch me playing System Shock 2 on one of those things. It was bad enough on a shitty old CRT.

The acid test for the difference in fear response types is The Blair Witch Project I find, personally that shit me right up