Play Alien: Isolation, and you will have a horrible time. That’s the way Sega and Creative Assembly are pitching next week’s blockbuster to the masses sat in front of their TVs.
Leave behind your sofas, the advert hisses. Leave behind your houses stuffed with cavity wall insulation where there should be salivating xenobeasts. Come and crawl on your hands and knees through an off-white spacetomb instead.
Narration comes in the form of Amanda’s doom-laden missives to a third-party she doesn’t know can hear her. There’s running, hiding and hitting synthetic beings really hard. And then the whole sorry affair ends in unpleasantly detailed first-person view of the moment before your eyes are vacuumed out by the most iconic monster in the science fiction archive.
Creative Assembly’s first-ever FPS might be sold on its scares, but I’m more interested in its systems. Here’s hoping that Isolation will be the game that reintroduces the underrated art of backtracking to PC shooters. What’re you hoping for?
The game will come to PC on Tuesday, October 7. Our Jules learned all the scare tricks inAlien: Isolationwhile at GamesCom – but still couldn’t manage not to jump out of his chair.