The problem with making successful horror games with the Aliens franchise is that the Aliens have been revealed... a lot. There is no mystery with them anymore. After 4 movies, countless comics and novels, countless video games - where the Alien and Alien variants have been killed multiple times, you have to tread new ground if you want to do something original. The horror with the Aliens no longer lies in the unknown...For example, the second or third time you watch Alien, it is no longer scary. My second playthrough of Amnesia was easy and scare-free.
I think that's exactly why an Alien game would probably work better as something on a smaller scale, in a single location. As you say, the surprise of the Aliens has been long lost, but their other key frightening quality is supposed to be how
absurdly deadly they are, right down to their acid blood - the idea that you simply can't confront them, and unless you manage to get a metal door between you and them (or you get lucky with some kind of airlock scenario) you're almost certainly going to die once they've spotted you - because they're so relentless and fast, because they're not going to get confused and drop their aggro after you hide behind some barrels and then stand facing in the wrong direction murmuring, 'Could've sworn I heard something...' or let you kite them down a long linear passageway, chipping away at their HP.
And I think that kind of frantic, fumbling environment-based 'have to get to this control panel and lock the doors before the thing eats me' disempowerment can be incredibly scary even on repeat plays and with over-familiar enemies - at least, the werewolf chase in Bloodlines continues to make me cack myself and yell, 'Fuck, fuck, fuck!' long after the Ocean House Hotel has become far too familiar and routine to have any impact at all.
Whereas with these Aliens-inspired heavily-scripted action games, it seems like the developer is always going to be battling against the xenomorphs' natural degeneration into the generic monsters of a thousand Aliens/Starship Troopers-influenced shooters, the 'nasty thing that spawns out of an air vent or at the end of a corridor and then you mow it down with your assault rifle'. No matter how hard you work on atmospherics or limited resources, the player is too empowered and the aliens too numerous and limited to recreate the impotent and above all
tactically-minded fear the characters experience in the films, the sense of '...I think it's gone - wait,
where has it gone? Should somebody make a dash for the power station? Should the wounded guy stay here to try and hold it off? What exactly is our plan here?'
Instead, as a matter of course, it's '
NPC 1: I got a baad feeling about this. Motion tracker beeps automatically, in order to recreate a beat from the movies. Wave of bugs spawns in at a certain point in the level. Player massacres bugs.
NPC 2: There's too many! Retreat. New objective: Retreat to X Checkpoint.' It's so horribly inorganic, and instead of trying to actively out-think an unpredictable AI opponent which can react to a changing situation, the player's following the game's orders, waiting for the next sequence to trigger so they can shoot more bugs. They have excessive power but zero agency, when it needs to be precisely the other way around.
