I want to replay Isolation at some point, but I’m worried that the experience will be disappointing. Like I said, I played it with my boyfriend, swapping the controller back and forth (and with my PC hooked up to my large TV and surround speakers for maximum quality). That helped avoid frustration and added the horror of watching someone else do things that I would *never* do on my own (and vice versa).

We played on Easy, and the Alien seemed to escalate in a very sensible fashion. It would disappear for decent stretches of time, so we’d have time to poke around before it dropped down somewhere. It stayed out of vents almost the entire game (as far as we could tell) so we had a safe way of traversing most environments that was a little less restrictive than the lockers. It also wandered in a wide area, so we had to constantly keep an eye out on distant areas for movement. It worked very well, and was still tougher than the average modern game.

That being said, there’s little effective difference between an dynamic Alien AI and an Alien AI that simply *appears* to be dynamic. If you can convince the player that the Alien shouldn’t be fucked with, and that it does genuinely learn and adapt based on your actions, even if what’s actually going on is some elaborate hard scripting designed to produce the illusion that it’s a vicious, learning predator, then the end result is the same. I wouldn’t care if the Alien was 100% scripted as long as it was scripted well enough that I never figured that out – or at least, didn’t figure it out until late in the game. That’s not the case here.

Re: your other complaints. They’re certainly valid – I got very frustrated over two minigames in particular that were presented with almost no explanation and which I had to google to figure out how to do them. The variety was nice but thanks to the visual design (which was excellent in all other respects but overengineered here) the goal wasn’t always clear. The review was 2800 words already, though, and they weren’t persistent enough as annoyances to really spoil my experience.

Also, I started the game on Hard, and was dismayed to discover that all this meant was that the Alien spent two levels practically humping my leg; the tether is very short on Hard, and it’s almost always prowling around. I dropped it down to Normal after that, and this made the Alien far more enjoyable to deal with as an enemy (at least until I sussed it out) – it’s around a lot, but not so much that you feel like you can’t move anywhere without it catching you. I did think it was a little too generous with the items on Normal, though. Ultimately that’s what the difficulty setting is for, though; it’s not a challenge (unless you want it to be), it’s a way to appropriately tune the game to the player so that it’s actually fun.

Bear in mind that when I say it’s scripted I’m not talking about the vanity animations where it suddenly appears after a long absence and the player needs to be shown that it’s now a threat again. Those are necessary and I have no complaints. There are some levels, however, where the alien’s behaviour is clearly running off of a narrow set of scripting – when the player gets to point X the alien teleports to point Y, ready to do something scary like leaping over a barricade unexpectedly. It relies quite heavily — although not entirely — on the standard set of level triggers that most other horror games do, and I’ve always found these to wobble alarmingly if you prod at them more than a little.

And still as the author says you are always safe if there aren’t any cabinets around. So alien appears in a area crafted for stealth but not in a way specifically crafted for it. I guess it helps against savescum though.

As for visibility, I don’t think we encountered any moments where it was entirely implausible that it would miss us. My understanding is that the alien AI adapts to how you play, growing suspicious of lockers, resistant to the flamethrower, and eventually even crawling around in vents (these were our choice of safe haven, and we never encountered the alien in them until the very end of the game).

I do have several complaints that I’m surprised to not see. The hacking minigames aren’t nearly intuitive enough for something that needs to be done while murderous creatures are stalking around, and the game seems to introduce new ones all the way to the end. Crafting materials are plentiful, but the recipes are very easy to miss. I didn’t even know that there were smoke bombs until I looked around online. I might have spent more time poking around the station to find recipes, but the game is shockingly difficult, even on Easy (Medium started to get frustrating and we didn’t want to become numbed to the game’s atmosphere). I’m not sure what could be done about the difficulty as, like you said, the game can’t really function without severe consequences for improper behavior, but if nothing else Ripley needed to be slightly tougher so her health bar didn’t seem to be mostly decorative.

I do think the game’s length could’ve been trimmed up a bit, though. In particular, the lengthy, android-centric section between the science lab and the reactor is more tedious than anything else. I imagine the developers weren’t sure they’d ever get the chance to make a sequel–horror stealth titles are pretty niche–so they wanted to throw in everything they could.

But regardless, I really liked the game and, if not for Dragon Age: Inquisition, it would safely have nabbed my GOTY spot.

There’s Pyramid Head. You see him first just standing behind bars without any intro cutscene. Then you see him in violent cutscene. Then he attacks you at some point and goes away not because he’s injured but because he’s bored with you or something. By this point he’s scary, but the next time you see him he again appears in normal gameplay without any cutscene. And then again. By this point you are scared of scripted encounter with him and you’re already stressed.

But then you just meet him in some corridor. He’s still invulnerable but this time it’s not a bossfight, he doesn’t do anything meaningfull, he just there. At this point I thought that he just spawns wherever he wants. I was scared to enter new rooms after this point. Later I’ve learned it was just a predefined drop, but it created a very good illusion.

I’m not sure why they’ve added randomization to Alien appearance. It’s not the game you’d want to replay, isn’t it? So that it looked spontaneous and random? Best random events are those that only look random.