I was hoping to keep up daily Halloween-themed posts through all of October, but I had way too much on my plate yesterday and didn't get a moment to myself until almost midnight. Who knew retired life could be so busy? Oh well; at least I never promised to do daily posts. Maybe I'll make a double post sometime to make up for it, or review an extra horror game on November 1st.
Today's horror-themed video game is Alien: Isolation. This takes place in the Alien movie franchise (specifically after the first film), and actually follows Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda, as she tries to track down what happened to her mother aboard the Nostromo.
As you may remember from the original 1979 film (Spoilers ahead; click to reveal)
spoiler
Ellen Ripley's crew responded to an emergency beacon and found an abandoned ship on a small planet. During their exploration, they ran across alien facehugger eggs and accidentally bred an alien, which escaped aboard their ship and managed to kill the whole crew except for Ripley. She managed to barely escape in a small vessel after blowing up their mining ship, the Nostromo.
This game takes place 15 years later. Amanda Ripley, now an adult and working for Weyland-Yutani (her mother's company), heard about a remote trading station called Sevastopol that had recovered the flight recorder from the Nostromo. She was invited along with the recovery team, only to find that the station was under duress and not responding.
Amanda is split up from her team while trying to board, finds the trading station mostly empty except for a few panicked people running and looting for their lives, and eventually discovers what's happening... an alien is loose and hunting people.
Worse yet, the androids running the trading station have locked everyone out of the communications hub and are refusing to contact the outside world. When you try to break in to contact your team on the orbiting ship, the androids mark you as a threat and turn violent. Nothing worse than hearing kind words from an android while being strangled to death...
This game is mostly stealth, sneaking around and avoiding aliens. But it definitely falls under the horror category and has its jump scare moments. The aliens patrol certain regions of the ship and you have to find your way around them using various tools, such as smoke bombs, noisemakers, flash bangs, and EMP mines. All of which you have to craft yourself using items you find scattered around the various floors of the trading station.
Plus, it's everyone for themselves, so you have to be careful about the people you run into. Some will help you; others will attack you. Use your best judgment when approaching others. And don't forget to use your motion tracker to see how close the aliens are to you. They like to hide in the vents and surprise you. But they can also hear the ping of the motion tracker, so use it sparingly if they're close by...
Alien: Isolation faithfully reproduces the original film in video game format, with the same theme music from the film, as well as high-quality reproductions of the film sets. The original film was a beautiful sci-fi spectacle, with incredible details on board the Nostromo. You get to see that same level of quality applied not only to your own ship (the same type as the Nostromo), but to the trading station as a whole. No corners were cut in the music and graphics department. Check out these familiar scenes reproduced from the film:
Note: these screenshots are all from my 4K gameplay with maxed out graphics settings. They may look a little blurry here, but click on them and you'll see the full 4K detail. It's absolutely gorgeous level of work that went into replicating everything in game. There are hardly any copy/paste levels; it's an insane amount of work to create a world that feels like you're actually living in it. I keep pausing just to admire the details of everything, even just random hallways!
This game is a masterpiece in graphic design, and the soundtrack pulled right from the 1979 classic film helps to pull you into this world even more. I really enjoyed this game and I can't recommend it enough!
I tried getting into horror games a couple of times, but it's such a mixed bag of good games and just games throwing cheap jumpscares at your face.
I tried Alan Wake 2 recently, but I found nothing enjoyable about the loud flashing jumpscares they constantly throw at the player. Even with reduced visuals and sound options it just feels like such a cheap thing that the game doesn't really need. Like someone exploding a plastic bag behind you, of course I get startled by it, but it isn't the same as being scared.
enjoying jumpscares is probably like enjoying rollercoasters (which i do). the adrenaline burst feels great for some people, and other people hate it. It seems a shame to have lots of them in games where that sort of feeling isn't the point.
Oh I've got no problem with rollercoasters, you know what's going to happen and you can see ahead to know what you're in for. That's more a thrill than scare I'd say, although perhaps for some people that might be a thin line.
I just feel like jumpscares have no place in horror, at least not the way it's done with loud and flashing images in Alan Wake 2. I wish games like Alan Wake had the option to turn it off entirely or something, would love to experience the story, but not with the cheap jumpscares being thrown in my face. I read about people that don't mind jumpscares like that got annoyed by the excessiveness of these during gameplay, getting particularly worse further in the game too.
That's a shame, because it really doesn't seem to benefit a game like Alan Wake 2 at all, atmosphere or story-wise, while turning lots of people away.