I can’t lie to you about your chances, but…you have my sympathies. -Dialogue from Alien

I’ve hidden in this locker for twenty minutes, and the creature still walks past, searching for me.

I don’t dare use the motion tracker when I see the creature hop into the air shafts. The damn tracker’s too loud while in use.

Twenty minutes I’ve hidden. Several times, the creature has come right up to the locker door and stuck its face against the shutters, searching for me. Smelling for me, even. I hold my breath until it walks away, and try not to make a sound as I gasp for air. I think of how I’m going to get out the locker and onto the tram waiting not five meters away from me. How can I get out and run and hit the button to activate the tram without the creature grabbing me and killing me?

For the third time, the creature, all eight feet of it, launches itself up into the air shafts. A vent leading into said shafts is right outside the locker I’m in. I wait.

And wait.

I think I’m clear.

The motion tracker emits a single bing. Loud. Reverberating. Damning.

And the creature is back again, stalking the tram station’s lobby. Looking for the source of that single beep.

Looking for me.

Through the vents in the locker door, I watch its tail slink around a column. Keeping it in visual range without having to use the motion tracker is best. That way, it won’t hear the beep. Problem with the tracker is, though, if something is moving within its range, stops moving, then starts moving again, it’ll emit a beep without me having to look at it.

The creature passes the locker again. Grunts in exasperation. Takes off into the vents again.

I wait. And wait. The trackers says nothing. I think it’s gone.

This is when my cat decides he wants his face patted and hits my right hand, which makes me hit the B button on the XBox 360 controller, which makes my game avatar leave the locker I’ve been hiding in. Which makes the creature pounce and take my damn head off.

This is about as easy as it gets in the recently-released video game Alien Isolation.

No need to harp on just how much of a fan I am of the Alien film franchise, especially the first, the landmark 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien. The release of Alien Isolation marks the first time video game designers creating an Alien video game have used Alien as opposed to James Cameron’s 1987 Aliens as a template. Gone are holding a pulse rifle and blasting away at hundreds of alien hoards. In Alien Isolation, you play as Amanda Ripley (referenced in a deleted scene from Aliens, which was re-implemented in the film in the Special Edition), daughter of iconic film heroine Ellen Ripley. The story is set 15 years after Alien (wherein Mama Ripley is floating around somewhere in deep space, not to be found until 32 years later). You journey to Sevastapol Station, where the flight recorder for the Nostromo (the ship from Alien) is located. You go there because you need to know what happened to your mother.

Author’s note: from here on in, when saying Ripley, it refers to Amanda, the video game character.

As Ripley, you find the Sevastapol space station has gone to shit. Much like how the character is treated, you are thrown into the game with nary a tutorial, or an easy first few levels. You basically have to figure out how to use the controls as you move around, the Worker Joe androids are malfunctioning and attack you on sight, and you discover that the humans left on the ship are frightened of something.

And that something is moving in the vents. Hunting you.

I don’t even really know what to praise first. As a massive Alien fan, this game is fan service personified. It’s as if Creative Assembly is made up of nothing but people who are as obsessed with Alien as I am. The sound effects are all pulled from the movie; the music is straight out the movie. It’s actually a bit of irony for me that my cat gives me a scare, much like Jonsey the cat does in Alien. Fan service creeping into my life. Everything about this game, from the computer terminals, the corridors, just the overall feel, screams Alien.

Speaking of screaming…

I like a video game to make me forget that I am sitting on furniture, staring at more furniture, and pressing buttons. Much like a movie or book, I want to be transported into a compelling story, follow the adventures or tribulations of characters I have at least a modicum of interest in. Alien Isolation goes way beyond not only transporting you to another time, another place. Games, for me at least, can have that power if done right, like, say, BioShock or Red Dead Redemption. I became lost in Rapture; I cared whether John Marsten could gain his family. With Alien Isolation, I figured I’d be able to play an Alien game that made me feel like I was in Alien, and get some good scares in the process.

I got the most terrifying experience of my life.

A game should be fun. Alien Isolation is not fun. It’s not fun hiding in one spot and moving three feet to another hiding spot and feeling I’ve completed a climb of the Matterhorn. It’s not fun when my palms sweat, when I have to pause every ten minutes to smoke a cigarette because I’m this close to having a panic attack. To be honest, if I wasn’t the massive Alien fan that I am, I wouldn’t play this fucking thing. Not because of the challenge (and boy, if you’re a Call of Duty/Grand Theft Auto/Madden kinda player, are you in for some shit) or the steep learning curve. It’s because you’re not playing a game whereby you’re a young woman trying to survive and hide from a beast that you can’t kill, you can’t harm, you can’t do anything with except stay the hell away from it. It’s that you become Ripley. You think of how a path through the med bay would be best to find a keycard, all while checking your motion tracker. You are hiding underneath a gurney as the alien stomps along the hallway, searching for the source of that chair you stupidly knocked over while rewiring the sprinkler system. From the moment you load the game until you shut your console off, you stop being yourself, and become Amanda Ripley, searching for what became of your mother, hiding from an unstoppable creature.

So why keep playing?

Accomplishment. See, the alien in the game is designed to learn from you. It has no scripted path. It figures out what you are doing, what your survival tendencies are. So being able to navigate through a section and make it out alive brings a wash of lovely, lovely relief over yourself.

You hide in a locker for twenty minutes, waiting for the thing to go away so you can get on the tram and meet with the others you came onboard Sevastopol with. All it takes is a cat who wants his face rubbed to knock you back to reality and calm you with the thought: it’s just a game.

Alien Isolation is more than a game, though. It’s bloody survival.