Alien: Isolation

[Steve]

15 hours

Yes. Shit is long.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I've been playing for 13 hours and I'm only at the end of San Cristobal medical bay (I actually died in the fire because I couldn't find my way out!).

Wow! I'm way past San Cristobal and I'm on 8, what have you been doing?

 

[skacky]

I'm a real snail when I play games like these. I'm very methodical (but still end up dying several times because I suck).

I think that with graphics and tech, what impressed me the most in this game is its insane sound design. It's really out of this world. All the sounds are great, the spacialization is actually very good and you can tell where the Alien is while it's in the vents just by listening. This is really up there with Thief 1, which is a very rare feat.

 

[Psquit]

I always pussy out in these types of games... Took me a week to beat resident evil 2.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm now on Mission 16, and I'm guessing this is the "free-range" part of the game, where I can visit other parts of the station and hack those unhackable doors and cut open those "ion torch required" doors. So next time I fire up the game I'm gonna do just that.

My father visited me today, and he sat with me as I played through a part of the game. He was the one who got me into the Alien(s) films, so of course he had to see this. He was amazed by how great the game looked, and how faithful it was to the source material, but when I asked him what he thought of the game itself he just said: "It's silly." I asked him what he meant. He went on about many things which are de facto standards in modern game design (which I'm not going to touch on here) but the key points he made in regards to this game involved the setting and story.

The Sevastopol is a space station that just happens to look like the "tug" part of the Nostromo, and all the interiors look just like parts of the Nostromo with the train stations and gallerias being the only real exceptions. And yet the station is supposed to have been built by another company than Weyland-Yutani?

The story was blatantly padded and "stretching the yarn" as he said it, with simple objectives constantly becoming more complicated and bothersome by the minute. (He's absolutely right on that.)

He laughed out loud as he watched the scene where Taylor finally gets to do something except just lie there. "If she doesn't melt into a puddle of goo just by standing where she is, she's gonna have more problems than just singed eyebrows and a better tan than Grace Jones."

In short, he was pretty much nitpicking and complaining the whole time. Except during one scene, he fell silent during the part of the game that can be called "The Message". Let me tell you this, if you are an Alien(s) fan, then that one scene will make the game worth playing, no matter what you think of this game. All the other sillyness, all the other inconsistencies, this makes up for it.

I also mentioned to my father that there's a 'mini-campaign' which involves the Nostromo and its crew. He said he wasn't interested in seeing it, but "tell me what you think of it after you've played it".

The talk with my father reminded me of some other funny inconsistencies, like how those security cameras will focus on you like a hawk if they spot you, but an 8-foot bio-mechanical alien lifeform doesn't even register for the camera, even if it murders a Sevastopol resident right in front of it.

Then there's the fact that the train carts don't set off the motion sensor. (Seriously, try it.)

If any of you are hunting for the achievements and are having trouble getting the "I admire its purity" achievement (Get a total of 50 unique blips on the sensor) then I suggest pulling out your sensor in the "WTF?" section of Engineering.

Finally, if you hear something that sounds like a piglet squealing...

Spoiler

...check the floor and aim fast. The shotgun works best. ;-)

 

[Whisky]

FUCK! Error accessing hard drive cache EXITING TO MAIN MENU.

What the fuck is this bullshit!?

 

[Sodafish]

FUCK! Error accessing hard drive cache EXITING TO MAIN MENU.

What the fuck is this bullshit!?

I had the same bug. Running the game as administrator fixed it.

I still get another intermittent bug where reloading crashes the game too. They need to patch this shit already.

 

[Whisky]

Yeah, it screamed running as admin, but generally I only ever had to do that with older games, you know, pre UAC. In 2014 that's just...what the fuck.

I'll give it a try later.

 

[Talby]

I wish I could change this game's inventory system. If I could, I'd rather use a more traditional grid inventory, so you have limited space for everything and have to prioritize things, rather than Isolation's system where each individual crafting component has an arbitrary limit. Add in the ability to mark locations on the map and you'd be able to make stashes of items you could return to later. This is something I did in SS2 and Ultima Underworld, where the inventory limit meant you can't carry everything at once.

 

[Jick Magger]

The story was blatantly padded and "stretching the yarn" as he said it, with simple objectives constantly becoming more complicated and bothersome by the minute. (He's absolutely right on that.)

To be fair, that's a pretty common trope among System Shock-esque games. Have to get to the 5th floor, need to activate the elevators again, the power room is locked, key is in the medbay, get the key, get in the elevator, find that it's blocked by bio-organic shit, need to clear out the bio-organic shit, etc.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

 

[Starwars]

My father visited me today, and he sat with me as I played through a part of the game. He was the one who got me into the Alien(s) films, so of course he had to see this. He was amazed by how great the game looked, and how faithful it was to the source material, but when I asked him what he thought of the game itself he just said: "It's silly." I asked him what he meant. He went on about many things which are de facto standards in modern game design (which I'm not going to touch on here) but the key points he made in regards to this game involved the setting and story.

The Sevastopol is a space station that just happens to look like the "tug" part of the Nostromo, and all the interiors look just like parts of the Nostromo with the train stations and gallerias being the only real exceptions. And yet the station is supposed to have been built by another company than Weyland-Yutani?

The story was blatantly padded and "stretching the yarn" as he said it, with simple objectives constantly becoming more complicated and bothersome by the minute. (He's absolutely right on that.)

He laughed out loud as he watched the scene where Taylor finally gets to do something except just lie there. "If she doesn't melt into a puddle of goo just by standing where she is, she's gonna have more problems than just singed eyebrows and a better tan than Grace Jones."

In short, he was pretty much nitpicking and complaining the whole time. Except during one scene, he fell silent during the part of the game that can be called "The Message". Let me tell you this, if you are an Alien(s) fan, then that one scene will make the game worth playing, no matter what you think of this game. All the other sillyness, all the other inconsistencies, this makes up for it.

I also mentioned to my father that there's a 'mini-campaign' which involves the Nostromo and its crew. He said he wasn't interested in seeing it, but "tell me what you think of it after you've played it".

The talk with my father reminded me of some other funny inconsistencies, like how those security cameras will focus on you like a hawk if they spot you, but an 8-foot bio-mechanical alien lifeform doesn't even register for the camera, even if it murders a Sevastopol resident right in front of it.

I wish I could brofist your father because he's absolutely bang-on.

Isolation no doubt has tons of work put into it, and as an Alien fanboy, just seeing the environments is cool. But it's also stupid and predictable, my god it's predictable. The writing is terrible. They start off with long sections of nothing much happening because, hey, that's how Alien did it so we totally have to do it for our vidya game. But the characterization is not there. The introduction to characters are downright laughable. Other things that were mentioned before is Ripley freaking out when coming across corpses. But basically not giving a fuck after killing humans herself. The reaction to the Alien in the cutscene, and then... nothing. No freaking out. You go on your merry way while the game unleashes its array of spooky sounds in the background.

It's like they want to try sooooo hard to make this into an authentic Alien experience, and then they found out somwhere along the way that... fuck, this is a videogame. I tries to build itself like it's the Alien movie, but it can't because... it's lacking the things that make the Alien movie really good, the biggest part the rising tensions of well-written humans stuck together in a small space. The slight paranoia of it all. Isolation is a good attempt but it's like... The more they tried to get away from the standard vidya game formula, the more it stands out. It's tense at times no doubt (scary? no), and the game bring some wonderful (and almost embarassingly fanboyish) moments, but all in all it's a stupid and annoying. Oh, I need *this* tool to open *that* door, but *that* tool to open *this* door. VIDYA GAMES! It's just draped in fanboyism for the original movie. Oh I'm sure the developers have watched all the documentaries and the audio commentaries to understand the DEPTH of it all! And then tried top copy it into this game. Pff.

And fucking Working Joes. Of course we have to have some secondary "SCAARRRY!" enemy so we make up an uncanny valley plastic doll and give it some weak excuse about its appearance (yeah, this company wasn't as technically advanced, and of course you shouldn't get attached to the synths, hence we make them look like that). Urgh.

Codex GOTY 2014.

EDIT: Frictional posted a blog entry back in May about some possible problems with Isolation. I find it holds very true after having played the game now: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.ca/2014/05/alien-isolation-and-two-hardest_5.html

 

[Severian Silk]

First of all, we need to examine the reason why the form is no longer frightening, and quite clearly it is familiarity.

I agree. A big part of what made the movie Alien scary to audiences in 1979 was that the creature was so, well, alien. It didn't look like anything people had seen before, and they had no idea of what it was capable of.

That's also, I think, why John Carpenter's The Thing is so effective (and the prequel is not).

What's a real shame is that Prometheus (despite being a pretty bad movie) gave them a perfectly valid lore reason to come up with a new creature as bizarre and frightening as the original Alien was in 1979, but the developer's wimped out and went with the same tired old xenomorph for the villain instead.

The reason Alien is no longer scary is because there have been all the shit movies and games where the alien isn't scary. If 50% of movies aren't scary, then you don't expect the next one to be scary so much.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

To be fair, that's a pretty common trope among System Shock-esque games. Have to get to the 5th floor, need to activate the elevators again, the power room is locked, key is in the medbay, get the key, get in the elevator, find that it's blocked by bio-organic shit, need to clear out the bio-organic shit, etc.

That WAS one of the things he criticized that I put under the "de facto standards" tag in my previous posts. This isn't just in System Shock-esque games, this is in A LOT of games. Need to collect x amount of items? Well, one of them has been split into two items, so that's x+1 for you to gather, plus the effort to have it fixed (superglue ain't gonna work). Need to touch four magical pillars? Guess what? One of them is broken, so you have to repair/replace it, using Unobtanium or something equally silly.

And of course, the level design. If, for some odd reason, a level allows for multiple paths towards the same destination, the shortest path will either only work once, or be one-way. The best example of this in Alien: Isolation is the final section of Medical, where you have to activate "the evacuation procedures" to get out. Look at your map and chart the shortest course from the door towards the controls, then try to get back that same path on your way back.

I'll bet you people money that in the short part of the game that's left, that there will be a segment where I can only progress after I've interacted with 4 items to get me through a door along the way. (The game has already done this twice already, so why not once more for good measure?)

(For those whom are wondering about my father, he is a mechanical AND electrical engineer who's now mostly dabbling in electronics. He's played a few video games over the years and set a few high scores that I have NOT managed to beat in the 20+ years that have passed, and he whoops me at Tetris 90% of the time, even today.)

 

[Morgoth]

Curious_Tongue you can stop posting these links on my profile. I get it, you're an attention whore.

Satisfied?

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I'm never satisfied

 

[Zewp]

I just started mission 10, where I have to try and trap the alien. I know that of course it won't work and I'm really not sure if I can deal with this game today. I got the flamethrower, but all it does is make the alien come back even more angry than before.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The flamethrower is a good all-round pest control. Against the Alien it only serves to give you more time...usually to go hide somewhere and wait for it to calm down.

EDIT: I also went and looked up the credits for Alien: Isolation to check out a hunch. While my hunch was wrong, I did learn two facts:

Ash is not voiced by Ian Holm.

Marhall Waits is voiced by William Hope, a.k.a. Lt. Gorman. (I THOUGHT that voice sounded familiar.)

Looking up Hope I see that he's been busy with all things Alien and Predator related, like how he "voiced" the Predator in AvP2 and AvP (2010), as well as a human character.

EDIT 2: Finally, one question to everyone that's been playing the game: How are you in finding your way around the levels? If I may say so myself, I am VERY GOOD at finding my way around places, yet this game has been giving me troubles. The in-game map is mostly to blame, because it only shows me one "layer" of each level at a time, yet has objeective locations showing up on the map THROUGH the layers, so sometimes I'm confused on which "layer" the objective is really at. I've learned that the best way for me to navigate is to ignore the map, just go with my memory instead.

Another related problem is when I'm suddenly thrust into another previously visited section of the station, it takes me far too long to realize where I am, and I know why: Everything looks the same.

 

[Zewp]

On that level I used the flamethrower on the beast just as I was going down the stairs and it ran away so I went and hid in a nearby locker. It definitely didn't see me go in because it stomped around the stairs for a good two minutes and then suddenly just ripped me out of the locker without warning. Its behavior around lockers seems very inconsistent. Sometimes it ignores them completely, sometimes it comes to investigate (in which case you need to hold your breath and lean back) and other times it just grabs you without warning. I'm never sure if the last one is the way it's programmed or just a bug.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I know, I had some troubles with the Alien and lockers. Besides the QTE being bugged, there may be another bug related to the lockers, but if there is one I don't know the exact specifics. Also, androids will look into lockers in the same way, requiring the same QTE.

Did something ELSE see you go into that locker, perchance?

But speaking of the Alien AI - I think I just figured out a big piece of the puzzle: Its basic operating parameters.

If you're in an Alien-infested zone, you will hear stomping sounds in the vents. This is the Alien "on patrol". Outside of a handful of scripted events, the Alien will come down from the vents to investigate under two circumstances:

1: It hears a loud enough noise (shots fired, explosions, sounds of combat, certain items being used).
2: If enough time has elapsed without incident (I'd say this is between 1 and 3 minutes on Medium difficulty).

This means that if you're in an Alien-infested zone, you WILL have encounters with the Alien no matter how stealthily you move. Have you noticed how the Alien always either drops down very close, or within earshot? That's due to the "the Alien is teleported where needed" point, and the vents are used to accomplish that purpose. The Alien never goes too far away from the player, so that anytime the game decides it's time for the Alien to investigate, it never takes very long for the Alien to reach you. BUT, distance is still a factor for the Alien in these circumstances, which may buy you a few precious seconds.

One thing I DO know for certain, is that in the unlikely event that the player manages to place considerable distance between itself and the Alien, then the game will "magically" teleport the Alien closer to the player.

This is why it's a very bad idea to engage in combat with non-Alien entities in an Alien-patrolled area. Unless you can dispose of the hostile VERY QUICKLY and hide afterwards you WILL get into lots of trouble.

EDIT: Found another Nostromo log: In the server farm there's a room with toxic gas. While I'm guessing there's a way to rewire ventilation to purge the gas, the gas mask found at a later point in the game renders that point moot. This one is from Lambert.

 

[Zewp]

Wait, the lockers QTE is bugged? That might explain why I've never been able to do the QTE successfully.

The locker in question was on the stairs, facing sideways so that I couldn't actually see the stairs. The alien came from the side and just ripped it open without warning. The only other NPCs around were all hiding out in the lobby that I passed through. I think lockers might just be a bit weird. In the med labs I was hiding in one when the alien came out of the vents to patrol and its head clipped right through the locker and into me, then it did the same thing by just ripping the locker open without warning. It's possible that it clips through certain objects and that on the stairs I just got unlucky and its tail clipped through or something.

I've also noticed that the alien comes down if you've been too quiet for a while. It stomps around the vents for a few minutes then comes down to investigate for a bit before going back. I've also noticed that it always seems to return to the vents via a vent that's close to you, so that you would know it's gone.

What is a bit annoying is how easy it is to get caught by the alien, but that it's not the case for NPCs. On the medlab level where you have to activate the evacuation procedure the alien was stomping all around the corridors, but didn't find the 3 patrolling human NPCs at all until I lured it towards them with a noisemaker.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Interesting. In the server farm there's a piece of vent with a small "room" in the middle that connects two big rooms together. Without fail, the Alien not only drops down when I go in there, but ALWAYS finds me in there, it's like it stomps around for a bit then just runs in a straight line towards me. And from my experience none of your equipment will stop the Alien when it's in the vents. :-/

EDIT: Interesting graphical bug, the biggest I've seen yet. There's a piece of scenery that looks like a kitchen desk, with little shelves above it that contain little glass containers full of foodstuff, cornbread and the such. Well, I only see the cornbread and such if I'm looking at this kitchen desk from an angle, if I stand directly in front it's all empty. This may be localized to the one location I'm at (server farm, habitation room beyond locked door in NE section).

EDIT 2: Is anyone else noticing inconsistencies in the health and battery meters? I had about 70% health and 40% battery when I saved, then suddenly I look and I have both to full. I die and reload a save, and the health is back to 70% while the battery remains full.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

ANNND... done. 26 hours clocked in, 40/50 achievements gained, 6/10 Nostromo logs.

The game degenerates into utter shit towards the end. Mission 16 is the last mission with any real gameplay as you have to dodge humans, androids AND the Alien. Mission 17 and 18 (the final two missions) are so horrible by comparison that I was raging while playing through them. Alien in my way? Fuck you, eat a pipe bomb. No more playing nice.

Case in point, in Mission 17 there's a section that is 4 connected rooms and a corridor that runs between them, turns to the left and ends at the rear of one of the rooms. Let's call them Rooms 1-4, counting in a clockwise rotation from where they're first encountered. Rooms 1-2 and 3-4 are connected together by a door, and each room has a door out into the corridor, except Room 2 which has 2 exits, one at the front and one at the rear. So how does the game set things up?

In the corridor, the door to Room 1 is blocked, the door to Room 2 is deactivated, the door to Room 3 is open but blocked by a table and the door to Room 4 is locked. So the only option is to follow the corridor and enter Room 2 from the rear. Of course the door into Room 1 is locked, so a maintenance vent must be used to reach Room 1. Once in Room 1 you'll find a powered-down generator and a access panel requiring a keycard. The keycard is next to a corpse in a small room off of Room 1, so I put the keycard in the access panel. This opens the door to Room 4 out in the hallway, but also brings in the Alien via scripted scene. The door between Rooms 1-2 also opens, which means better access for you AND the Alien. Joy.

Anyway, I have to make my back to Room 2, out the back door, down the entire corridor and into Room 4, where there is nothing of value except for the door to Room 3, where there is a door leading somewhere. I approach this door and I need to pull a handle to unlock it. I do so... and the power goes out. Remember that generator back in Room 1? Yeah, now I have to go ALL THE WAY BACK! Room 3 > Room 4 > corridor > Room 2 > Room 1 > Power on generator, then back to Room 2 > corridor > Room 4 > Room 3 > through door. I SCREAMED at the monitor after this sequence, and things didn't get much better for the rest.

Mission 18 is almost ALL scripted sequences and QTE's. Yes, the final moments of the game are one big QTE. I have never felt so insulted while playing a game.

And the ending?

Spoiler

"To be continued" in a DLC.

I'm gonna give the DLCs a try after I recover from this.

Oh, one thing for those complaining about the inventory: You can half-craft an item by clicking on the components that are available, and they'll be stored in the blueprint instead of the inventory. This almost doubles the available inventory space.

 

[Daedalos]

I am still genuinely puzzled as to how and why people are having so many graphical glitches, bugs and other problems with this game.

I've had still had ZERO problems, perfect play through and I'm at 15+ hours now...

I don't understand this, I must either be the luckiest alien isolation gamer, or you guys just have shitty comps and/or have tinkered with your install (or maybe even pirate versions)

anyway...

More feedback:

Spoiler

The story is sufficient for me.

I have reached the underground "alien lair" levels. It's fucking scary. FACEHUGGERS are in now, and coming out of eggs left and right, and distant screams n' shit from captured innocents, all the while the alien is fucking angry and just towering through the vents and in my face.

I love it. I absolutely love it.

This will be a close contender for GOTY for me, still.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Since I couldn't screencap the everspinning human, this bug will have to suffice for laughs: