Sadly, the aesthetic achievements fail to redeem Alien: Isolation's fatal flaw: its brutal difficulty. If you’re found, you’re dead. It's as simple as that. And the game doesn't come with any indicators of how to sneak more effectively, nor any smart level design that encourages searching for multiple paths. In nearly every bad situation, you have only one way to go, and once you figure out your path, it becomes a matter of throwing distracting gizmos and walking to your destination in the hopes that your foes have glitched into a dumb moment to allow you to pass.
The alternate, logical tack of hiding, waiting for foes to pass, setting traps, and walking along rarely pays off, because Alien Isolation’s AI offers no predictable patterns or reasonable logic. One minute, a Xeno stares right into your eyes and walks past. The next, it drops directly onto your head after your radar insists that the nearest motion is at least two rooms away. The game tries to evoke old-school challenge with elements like manual save points and dinky puzzles, but those things are mere annoyances compared to the frustration of the game's linear environments and punishingly random AI.
