Back in 2011 Creative Assembly announced a new Alien game. Not Aliens, but Alien, immediately raising hopes of a game of fear and tension rather than guns and explosions. Then all contact was lost.
Two years later they resurfaced and announced Alien: Isolation, in which you play as Amanda Ripley – Ellen Ripley’s daughter. A promising start, the name itself hinting at a game of cat and mouse, of survival horror, of Alien. Indeed, rumours backed this up:
You, as Amanda, spend most if not all of the game on a single space station, according to our source. There’s only one alien for “most” of the game
– Kotaku
But then…
You’ll mostly be shooting through “clones and soldiers.”
– Kotaku
Bah humbug. But perhaps that was out of context, or things have changed. A teaser trailer has just been released and it features not a single gun, just lots of fear:
Aliens has been done to death. The marines vs aliens plot, the guns and motion scanners, the environments, the sentry guns, all of these things lend themselves very well to video games (it is surprising then that there hasn’t been a particularly good Aliens game, but that’s a whole different post). An Alien game, however, is a much harder sell for a big studio. Can they string out survival horror and maintain the sense of isolation and dread of the original film for a whole game without either boring the player or slipping into the tired comfort of guns and shouting? We’ll see. But if nothing else, the teaser alone is a welcome start to 2014.