This year we’re putting together a list of 31 Retro Horror games. Games that have come from dead console generations, back to haunt us. Sadly, not all of these games will be available for you to play due to the complicated nature of video game preservation. However, we’re going to note if it’s possible to play them on modern hardware. We’re going to be covering games from the Seventh Generation (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii) and earlier. So basically anything before 2006.
Day 15
Alien: Isolation
The game starts with you playing as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley from the films. Amanda has signed up on a mission in search of her mothers distress beacon, and to discover the mysterious circumstances surrounding her mothers disappearance. This journey takes her crashing into the Sevastopol, a derelict space station that is currently in the stage of revolt, chaos and an infestation of some sort of vicious alien being known as the Xenomorph.
It’s from here that you are thrust into a terrifying adventure of trying to get the information you want, while also being hunted by the deadly alien, as well as the rioters and a synth android uprising. The game revolves around a lot of sneaking and hiding with being caught leading to almost certain death. There’s a perfect level of tension surrounding the hiding mechanics because safety is never truly guaranteed, and every moment is punctuated by a completely dynamic orchestrated soundtrack that knows exactly when to ratchet up the tension.
On top of the orchestrated soundtrack and chilling hiding mechanics, I also would like to emphasize the Alien Xenomorph itself. It’s a trained hunter and killer that stalks you as its prey throughout large portions of the story, but on a technical level, its AI is something worth discussing. The Xenomorph operates in two different ways: the menace gauge, which is a meter on the back end that measures how often it appears, and will gauge, based on your actions, when is the perfect time to appear and scare you. This works to keep you guessing as you never know when the alien will appear to stop you in your tracks. 2: The alien’s AI, which is a series of directives. Specifically, imagine a spider web, starting out with only 3-4 nodes, but branching outward into multiple other nodes. This is the learning process of the alien, so if you are constantly hiding in lockers, it will begin to start looking in lockers. It’s ever learning and also works as a real entity in game, so it is always somewhere on the map waiting to start hunting you. But it’s fair and doesn’t cheat, which makes for the feel of an actual animal learning your moves. It’s haunting.
The Alien: Isolation story takes you all over the space station and at some points outside of it. It’s equally fast paced and intensely slow. It works in waves to show you how fast things can spin out of control when it comes to the Sevastopol. The game even goes as far as letting you relive some of the key moments of the original movie, in a fantastic homage that feels right out of the film. The developers were given tons of data as far as reference material from the films, so they had a lot to work with when trying to make this game as accurate and closely tied to the film franchise as they could. To me it’s a triumph and still to this day still manages to shock and awe me while feeling totally in line with what I would see in theaters. I usually go back to re-watch Alien yearly, but this felt close enough to that, that I felt happy with this being my spooky season Alien inclusion. I would recommend our audience check this out if they want more of that world because the developers at Creative Assembly did a phenomenal job with it, and will be doing it again in a sequel in the near future.
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