So yeah, been playing a bit further in, and a few more comments here and there:
I'm starting to see what
Unkillable Cat was talking about; there are times where it really feels as though the game's been padded out to add more length. It's mostly little bits and pieces (i.e. the keycard to the med-bay is in a safe that's right next to the computer with the passcode, which is in an office adjacent to the door the key unlocks), but other times it's just shameless. I'll just use one example: At one point in the game you have to repair an elevator. The elevator needs a compression cylinder. You learn from the banter of hostile humans that a Working Joe in storage might be able to show you where to find one. You get into storage, find the power's been cut. You run to the power room on the second floor, you need a level 2 hacking thing to reactivate power. You go back down the ladder, back in the storage bay, run to the other side of the storage bay, find the level 2 hacking device in a little office in there, run back to the entrance, go back up the ladder, back in to the power room, hack the console, get power back on, go back down the ladder, back into the storage room, activate android, and he tells me where the compression cylinder is and unlocks the door to the other storage room for me. At no point during this entire segment does the alien attack unless you start running around alot and make alot of noise.
The kicker? Right next to the power room is an office that also has a level 2 lock, and inside there is a terminal which tells you
exactly where the cylinder is. So at that point the only reason you need the android is essentially because the door is locked for arbitrary reasons.
You could easily cut out at least 5 minutes of what basically just amounts to busywork and the infuriating dilemma of having to follow an npc who's default speed is
slightly slower than yours, so you always find yourself having to stop and let them catch up, by just cutting the android part out altogether and just having either the door locked due to a power outage (that can be fixed by reactivating it on the second floor), or having the terminal also have the code to unlock the door.
It's not really filled with moments like this, but it's common enough to be noticeable.
In regards to the Alien's AI behaviour. I'm finding that there are certain segments in the game where the alien will absolutely never come out of the vents unless the player makes alot of noise for whatever reason (whether it be firing a gun, blowing something up, or just running around). Though this leads to the player resorting to crouch-walking everywhere constantly from fear of attracting the alien and having to redo an entire segment, which once again makes the game feel alot longer than it really should.
So far, I've found precisely two moments where the game just plain fucked me:
1. Heard the alien come out of a vent in a hallway near a room I was in, crouch walked to the locker and hid inside. Alien comes in around 10 seconds later, looks around the room (never comes to investigate the locker), for a bit, then went out of sight and appeared to lave. A few seconds later it just jerked itself back into view with no warning, ripped my locker door off, and killed me instantly. I don't know if this was an intentional behavioural pattern (i.e. this is one of the routines the AI goes through to 'toy' with the player), but it still left me extremely annoyed since I now had to re-do the entire section because the game just felt like fucking me.
2. This was directly after I found the compression cylinder in storage. It comes out of one of the vents near storage entrance, and I hide behind a couple crates in the middle of the room. Following 2 minutes of it trailing around and around the boxes as I keep circling them to keep out of sight, it just gives up and goes back into the vent. Since this place is right next to the door, I just crouch walk out. This takes, tops, 5 seconds to do, and the moment I'm in the hallway, the alien is there (from the side leading to the elevator, not android storage), and kills me instantly. There is no vent in that hallway, I did not hear the alien come out of any vent, and even if it did get out of a vent that I somehow didn't notice in the pure-white 70's-chic padded walls, it didn't have nearly enough time to get from one vent to another so goddamn quickly.