E3 2019: Alien: Isolation Coming to Switch

Holy buckets what? So there were quite a few incredible announcements and reveals during the Nintendo’s E3 direct stream, from shocking cross-platform team-ups to dropping a huge sequel bomb on us, but one small reveal kinda blindsided us. In amongst a clip show of smaller releases, 2014’s Alien: Isolation was revealed to be coming to Nintendo Switch!

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I’m shocked, honestly, but I’ll take it! Alien: Isolation was our GOTY back in 2014, and boy does it deserve it. My personal scariest game of this generation thus far, its combination of screen perfect recreations of the tech and atmosphere of the original 1979 Alien and master-class tension made for an experience that I’ve honestly been a bit too afraid to jump back into again. After the reveal, I’d pondered how to get Alien on Switch considering what a… high yield game it is (tons of atmospheric effects, fog, lighting, etc), but I’d actually forgot that the game was cross-gen — releasing across both last gen and current. My first time playing through it was actually on PS3, and the experience was still tremendous. A comparison between the PS3 and PS4 versions looks basically the same. Mostly, everything just looks crisper, as PS3 probably was locked at 720p, while PS4 is full 1080p. Presumably, Switch will pull this game off just fine, although it worth noting no actual gameplay was shown during this announcement. Considering the vague “landing in 2019”, the game may still be in an optimization stage for the system.

We’ll keep you updated on this. With this, Resident Evil 5 and 6, and The Witcher 3, I’m having less and less reason to even bother turning anything else on. Hoo boy and that’s not counting Zelda: BotW2. How in the hell did Nintendo win E3 without even bothering to show up? That’s what they call Nintendo polish, I guess.