Hey! There’s an Alien Isolation trailer scuttling about the vents here somewhere, if you’re interested. In it, a Colin Firthian voice actor gets to say “We get to shut the book, Ripley,” in a prim staccato only faintly recognisable to the English as their own accent.
It’s not the Ripley he’s referring to, though – she’s out of reach for videogame adaptations, for sensible reasons – but daughter Amanda, who learns the whereabouts of the Nostromo’s black box fifteen years after her mother’s disappearance in shouty, quivery circumstances. Creative Assembly have piggybacked Ripley the Younger’s quest to find mother as an opportunity to return to the mother of sci-fi horror – because they think they know what made it tick. They say as much in this interviewish video.
Our Steve has been hands on with Alien: Isolation, and said this of the fictional conceit: “It’s a neat bit of canonical nip-tucking that lays Alien: Isolation’s story right on the doorstep of the original film, and delivers a playable character that naturally draws on one of the most loved sci-fi heroes of all time. That it doesn’t appear to involve a single Colonial Marine either is also a bonus.”
I’m already fond of the distinctive “mechanical, push button feel” to Isolation’s environments. What pushes your mechanical buttons about this last-ditch attempt to save the franchise from Pitchford et al?