Alien: Isolation is still inspired (and inspiring) after 10 years

Acclaimed film critic Gene Siskel described first Alien film as a haunted house in space. That’s what ensnared fans back in 1979—and its simple story of a distress signal, some dodgy decisions about quarantine, and a creature whose very existence is a threat is still as effective (and horrific) now as it was then. What do you do against an enemy that requires human death to be born? How do you fight something with blood so acidic that killing it just gives it one last way to attack you?

The Alien series grew a lot in the ensuing years, with sequels and adaptations exploring where the creatures came from, where humanity began, and what it means to create life at any level. But the draw of the world has always been the idea of human beings encountering an apex predator so well-designed that survival seems impossible.

That was the idea explored in Alien: Isolation, a 2014 game from Creative Assembly that returned to the earliest themes of the series and enthralled a new generation of horror fans. In fact, Alien: Romulus—the latest film in the series—may never have existed without the Alien: Isolation team's tight focus on what originally made the series so great.

Today, we look back at Alien: Isolation's legacy, and how it not only reminded us of how good Alien games could be, but how great Alien could be as a whole—so much that it continues to inspire new Alien projects all these years later.
 

10 years of admiring the creature’s purity

Alien: Isolation was always a project looking both forward and backward at the same time. It was a continuation of the story in the first Alien film, designed for modern audiences but with a story that took place before 1986's Aliens. Alien: Isolation was effectively a modern take on a retro idea, carefully written to avoid disrupting the canonical timeline.

Placing the story between Alien and Aliens also allowed Creative Assembly to expand the idea of what could be done in an Alien game. There would be one central enemy, the Xenomorph itself, and there would be very little you could do to fight back. The player would feel completely outmatched by the alien for the vast majority of the experience, and the team spent a lot of time making sure the creature’s AI was tuned perfectly.

Even in 2024, it’s hard to think of other games that followed in its footsteps. “We had such a really boiled-down, pure vision of what we were trying to achieve, to recreate the feeling of being hunted by the alien from the first movie. That was what we were going for completely,” lead designer Gary Napper explained.

It was an issue of what Napper called “purity of mechanics,” an approach that would be harder to pull off today with games increasingly needing to appeal to as many audiences as possible. You had to buy into the experience of playing Alien: Isolation, and you had to be okay feeling underpowered and afraid—like prey instead of (pardon the pun) predator.

They were helped by the fact that Alien: Isolation was meant to be a standalone story in the Alien universe.“One of the big differentiators was there was no film to tie into,” Napper stressed. “We got to make the game that we thought was right.”

Napper, who has worked on Halo and Harry Potter titles, pointed out how rare that is. “The game comes out with the film. That's the rule,” Napper said. “So [with other games] you don't really have this scope to explore because you're on the clock.”

Without being forced to meet the release date of a particular film, the Alien: Isolation team had more freedom to try different things without being limited by whatever audiences might expect based on a film trailer or known plot details.

Of course, that experimentation also wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the game’s publisher, Sega, who were trusting the team to create a game that would certainly stand out, for good or ill. If Sega wasn’t comfortable with the direction of the game, none of this could have happened. “Sega was brilliant,” Napper enthused. “...They were very hands-off. They allowed us to achieve it. Every time we showed them something, they were happily impressed.”

While many games are designed to give the player a sense of power, Alien: Isolation was designed to make the player feel almost helpless in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The design went against just about every trend at the time—and Creative Assembly had the full support of Sega.

It’s the sort of game that stands up on its own merits for years, which is why we’re still discussing it in 2024. Heck, a book about the game’s creation and design is on the way.

And a few years after launch, one person picked up Alien: Isolation and enjoyed the experience so much that the team at Creative Assembly can now say that they inspired the Alien series itself, long after they themselves were inspired by it.
 

Becoming a part of the world you love

The Alien franchise is filled with characters whose lives consist of long periods of cryosleep punctuated by moments of incredible violence and bloodshed. It’s a world in which things sometimes seem peaceful right up until the moment they’re not.

Alien: Isolation followed a similar pattern. People kept talking about it, years after launch. Its design was (and still is) constantly discussed by fans and other developers alike. It continues to find new players.

One of those players was celebrated horror director Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe), who gave Alien: Isolation a shot while he was waiting for Don’t Breathe to be released. Even directors have to pass the time, you know?

By that point, Alien: Isolation had ceased to be a game set in the world of the films and had become its own distinct entry in the series. It helped Alvarez begin imagining what a stripped-down Alien movie created and released for today’s audiences might look like.

“...At the time, I was like, ‘F—, if I could do anything, I would love to do Alien and scare the audience again with that creature and those environments.’ I was playing and realizing how terrifying Alien could be if you take it back to that tone,” he told GamesRadar.

Years later, that seed of an idea would turn into Alien: Romulus, a back-to-basics horror film that feels much more like Alien than Aliens.

“Naturally, films tend to get more bombastic as they go,” said Napper. The second film in the series was literally called Aliens, after all, and focused more on action and the idea of what a pitched battle between trained soldiers and the Xenomorphs might look like. The haunted house in space had turned into a battleground in space.

Then there were the Alien vs. Predator films, games, and comics, and original director Ridley Scott went on to explore heavier themes of the relationship between creation and destruction in films like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The tail had begun to wag the dog. Movies were continuing to be made, but they kept moving further and further away from the original film’s concept.

Alien: Romulus isn’t a step backward, but it is a little bit of a step away from the sound and fury found in many of those recent Alien films. Alien: Romulus, like Alien: Isolation, leans toward smaller-scale horror. It gave everyone an excuse to reset expectations. One of the first promotional images for Alien: Romulus showed a clapboard, a facehugger, and a phone that looked like one of the save points from Alien: Isolation. If you want to know what inspired the movie, that tells you everything you need to know.

The save points from Alien: Isolation informed the rhythm of Alien: Romulus itself, in fact.

“The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone,” Alvarez told GamesRadar. “In the game, every time you knew there’s a phone, you’d go, ‘F—, I’m about to go into some bad set-piece.’ It’s the same thing here. You’ll see they’re planted strategically throughout the film. When you see the phone, it’s like: brace for impact.”

The reality is even messier than that though, as Napper explained how much he had been inspired by the Dead Space series and other classic science-fiction releases when making Alien: Isolation. This is a situation where movies inspired games that inspired games that inspired movies that will likely go on to inspire games.

Art is often a tightrope walk between honoring your influences and adding your own spin to them. It’s a trick that the Alien: Isolation team made appear effortless. During development, they would play the movie on loop on one set of screens, with moments from the game shown on another set of screens around the studio. The longer they worked, and the more the game came together, the more the two images resembled each other. They knew they had something special when even members of the team would be momentarily confused about which was which.

As for people coming to Alien: Isolation for the first time all these years later, Napper didn’t hesitate when we asked for his advice. “The trick is to think of the Alien as another player who is thinking and trying to trap you, and not just AI that is easily fooled,” he explained. When the game launched, players would assume the Xenomorph would act like an unintelligent NPC, and would get frustrated when it seemed to know where they were hiding. The truth is, they were taking what they expected from an Alien game for granted.
 
“When you start to treat the AI with the respect of another player's abilities, suddenly it is a very different experience,” Napper continued. “So yeah, I still say keep moving, keep slow, and think like you're playing against another person, not a video game character.”

That advice might sound like hubris if it were any other game, but Alien: Isolation really does provide that level of challenge from its central antagonist. The fear doesn’t just come from Alien: Isolation's tone and design, but from the menace and relentless nature of the creature itself. You’re being hunted, and that’s not a comfortable feeling—but it is striking.

Creativity is a conversation, and Alien: Isolation is the rare game that wasn’t just a reaction to its source material, but joined the conversation directly. No wonder we’re all still playing it, loving it, and being inspired by it a decade later.

Alien: Isolation is available on the Epic Games Store.