A Mild Defense of the Worst Part of Alien: Isolation

With the ten year anniversary earlier this month and the accompanying announcement of a full blown sequel featuring almost none of the original development team whoops, I decided to replay Alien: Isolation. About halfway through, I had an idea: I always hear about how Bad the last chunk of this game is, but I never felt that way! What if I made a blog post about why the back half of Alien: Isolation was Good, Actually?

A great idea, with one unfortunate flaw: it required revisting the back half of this game for the first time since (let me check Steam real quick) 2017? Been a hot minute.

Yeah, turns out the back half of Alien: Isolation has some problems.

You've got long stretches of dealing with nothing but androids, you've got two (count 'em! two!) separate space walk sections that are ultimately a long hallway where you press a button and walk back, a big Cinematic Setpiece which is just another long hallway but with jangling keys on the walls, and then to top it all off the final showdown is a very unflattering and kind of silly QTE. To say that Alien: Isolation drops the ball would be an understatement. In a game with such tremendous highs, the lows are rather abysmal, the vestigial remnants of contemporary trends eating away at an otherwise timeless center.

But. But!

It's not all bad? In fact, there's some really cool stuff towards the end of the game? Some of the best, most thematically interesting stuff, even?

Let's start with the obvious one. After Amanda Ripley purges the reactor core, the station is swarmed with aliens, meaning that, as a wise man once put it: Now There Are Two Of Them.

This fucking rules. It's only occasionally that you'll ever see two aliens active at the same time (I've only seen them in the nest and then in the final hunt before escaping to the Torrens) but it makes for a far more compelling mechanical climax than just jettisoning the alien after two fairly brief encounters and rolling credits. Furthermore, during these segments the player is given fewer places to hide and is armed with a games worth of fuel and molotovs. It's the big action climax where you can finally truly stick it to the alien in a way you never quite could before; it's easy to hide from the xenomorph in the Gemini Labs, making the newly acquired flamethrower far less of a necessary tool; but going through the remains of Sinclair's hideout- with its barricaded rooms and narrow hallways- forces a level of aggression towards the alien the rest of the game doesn't really require. This is the part of the game where I found myself setting traps; using noisemakers to get the xenomorph away from the objective or molotovs to send it scurrying long enough for me to play the next hacking minigame.

Despite the increased difficulty inherent to the claustrophobic level design (and I think the alien itself was more aggressive here? at least it seemed like it was.), the player and Ripley both exhibit a confidence in this section that was wholly absent from San Cristobal; a confidence mechanically reinforced by everything that came before.

Earlier in the game, after the first xenomorph is jettisoned into space, the game makes some interesting moves. The Working Joe's, Seegson's terrible attempts at breaking into a market already dominated by Weyland-Yutani's far superior product, take center stage as the games primary antagonist as they (and the Apollo AI controlling them) seemingly malfunction and go rogue. Simultaneously, Sinclair's band of corrupt corporate security goons (read: private military) begin looting and pillaging the rest of the station. There's some fun narrative stuff in this section, particularly in the computer logs: Weyland-Yutani's conspicuously timed buy-out of the station, Sinclair's regrets in his dying moments, Ransome's realization that the corporate ladder has long since been pulled beyond his reach. But the best bit of storytelling in this chapter isn't part of the direct narrative of the game, despite how important it ends up being to the game as a whole.

See, Working Joe's and Sinclair's thugs both share two significant weaknesses: they aren't hunting Ripley, and the can't go in vents. To best navigate these sections of the game, the player needs to go on the offensive, to stop hiding in lockers and start setting traps, using vents and rewire tools to hide in plain sight, start working on a Wile E. Coyote cosplay.

The station's ecosystem centered on an ambush predator at the top, and with the alien gone, it was only natural something would take its place. Might as well be you.

I started playing as the alien here. I would come out of vents to whack an unaware enemy and then leave long before anyone noticed my presence, set up ambushes so that the superior firepower or durability of my prey no longer mattered.

The AI in A:I famously "learns" about the player as the game continues, adapting to your strategies and developing counters, forcing you to constantly shake things up in an informational arms race; it might have learned what noisemakers are, but has it learned what mines are yet? Does it know that you can fit under desks yet?

It's only natural, then, that the player learns everything they can about the alien. I learned to track it by its footsteps, no longer needing the motion tracker. I learned how far I needed to be to safely stand up and walk. And I learned how it hunts.

And how to hunt like it.

It's a narrative beat delivered entirely through the games mechanics, the games characters never acknowledging Ripley's shift in the stations hierarchy (though this might be because most of them are dead). It's also a beat that parallels the games source material. Though Alien: Isolation is primarily concerned with adapting the original 1979 film, it's unavoidable that elements from later in the canon would find their way in. One such thematic element is that of the merging of Ripley and Alien. As their existences become so thoroughly intertwined over the course of four movies (two of which are even good!), the distinction between the two becomes academic. By the time Brad Dourif starts being a weird freak, Ellen Ripley has become as much an alien to humanity as the xenomorph is. It's an element of the franchise that keeps cropping up in the things inspired by it, despite the dubious quality of the movie it's found it.

Soldier G65434-2 starts putting worms in his mouth, Samus starts doing Proton Cannon, and Amanda Ripley starts hunting in the vents. It's part of the formula at this point.

When the alien returns with friends, what follows is less a tense chase through a labyrinth and more a territory dispute. The two apex predators, Ripley and Xenomorph, having chewed their way through every other threat on the station, are left to settle things the only way they know how: one final all or nothing hunt.

It's sick as hell. And it's something that only happens in the "bad" half of Alien: Isolation.

I'm being generous, of course. The back half of Alien: Isolation still has the weakest parts of the games level design, and the Working Joe subplot drags on for far too long, and the actual surface level writing of the game is very dry and exposition heavy in a way that becomes tiring very quickly. But, fuck man I don't know. I don't think I want a version of Alien: Isolation that doesn't have that weaker half, that doesn't make those swings. Besides, it's not like the first half is flawless either, remember Axel?

This is Alice Snakewitch, last surviving member of the Eggbugstromo. Signing off.