The cleaners have started to come round the Creative Assembly offices. I walk into a stark white bathroom where a paper towel dispenser's guts hang open below the hand dryer. It looks sad. I walk towards a cubicle.

Suddenly, the hand dryer goes off by itself and my chest clutches in at me like a claw. The hand dryer switches itself on and off and on and off. Each time I remind myself there's no one there.

The cleaner pops in. 'Sorry!' she says, and potters off.

Even as I write this I still feel frightened. There's a kind of bleak dread I felt on the Sevastopol, the remote space station featured in Alien: Isolation. It's a dread that lingers. The game's environment is beautiful, enchanting even. But it is unsettling. And the… Alien. I don't really want to talk about the Alien. But I guess you're going to make me. It's like a black hole that the mind dances around.

Creative Assembly is taking on something so beloved that it seems like an unbearable weight. It is making a spiritual sequel to the 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien, with the full blessing of 20th Century Fox. Set 15 years after the Nostromo set off on its doomed voyage, the story follows Ripley's daughter, Amanda, now a Weyland-Yutani employee. The flight recorder of her mother's ship has been recovered. It is on the Sevastopol. She must investigate.

Impossible mission

The development team all seem like fans of the Alien franchise, admirers in particular of Ridley Scott's scalding narrative of quiet existential dread and huge, looming monster horror.

I too am this keen; I studied the film for my degree, I wrote essays on its dark imagery, its feminist symbolism, its sexual terror. As I look around at the journalists being herded to and fro in the studio, I know each one of them at one point in their life has probably known a similar obsession with this sci-fi classic. From my little ivory perch, it seems too much, and wonder if the developers know what on Earth they have the reins of. They have hitched their wagon to a giant of our nerd culture and set off at a reckless yet admirable pace.

Many have stumbled before at this task. Gearbox's last dance with the Alien franchise - Aliens: Colonial Marines - was buggy and disappointing, and brought very poor reviews. But Creative Assembly has ransacked the 20th Century Fox archives where the 1979 film's historical debris has been stored. The developers describe in depth to me how much material they have been exposed to: the blueprints and measurements for the sets, the original concept art. Ron Cobb's 'Semiotic Standard for all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft' symbols sit on a screen like buttons I could press.

Both the archive materials and the aesthetics of the movie been ingested and reproduced. The team talks excitedly of how they wanted to make Weyland-Yutani corporate videos look analogue, fuzzy. So they made the clips and recorded them on to old VHS machines, then bashed them around with magnets until when played back they skipped and blurred. The audio designers tell us about how they found unlabelled reels in the 20th Century Fox Alien archives that turned out to be hours of cockney sound designers making weird sound effects. They took the entire original soundtrack and rerecorded it with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, some of whom were present the first time the music was recorded with original composer Jerry Goldsmith.

It's impossible not to be excited and feel crippled by the scope of it at the same time. They're trying to recreate the sort of black magic that you feel could only have happened under the light of a certain mysterious constellation, and only under the hand of Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, and HR Giger. So I wouldn't want to be them. But if there's anyone who could make this work, it's Creative Assembly.

Lost in space

"When she left Earth, Ellen Ripley promised her daughter Amanda she would return home for her 11th birthday," explains the press release. "Amanda never saw her again.

"In order to uncover the truth about her mother, Amanda is forced to confront the same terrifying thing that separated them."

The idea is to survive when you know it is unlikely that you will. Watching the original 1979 film, you notice how silence is used to unsettle, to create a sense of waiting, of dread, and of uncertainty. Creative Assembly have noticed too. To wake in the game on the Sevastopol, in the belly of a place so like the Nostromo, the vast universe peering back at you through the portholes and from behind dust motes, it's overwhelming at first. The doors are familiar thanks to 20th Century Fox's set designers meticulously recording their shape and size. The gentle flutter of a familiar Jerry Goldsmith-penned flautist drifts notes over your shoulder. Everything looks as if 20th Century Fox merely left the fully functioning Nostromo drifting in space until Creative Assembly opened it back up one day and rearranged some rooms and pickups so it has became more like a puzzle. The level designers tell me a large part of the game is performing tasks under duress of fear, solving puzzles in an environment where you know your movements draw attention to you.

Press to bring up the motion tracker: there is no green blip on the radar. Your destination is indicated on the top of the device. But, you realise, that when you look at the motion tracker, the rest of your vision blurs. This is the key to your survival: the dilemma of knowing. Do you know where it is? Or can you see where it is? Do you look at the device, trusting it's far away? Or don't you want to know?

You slowly make your way through the abandoned remains of the dead crew, picking up fuel, tools, a torch. All the while, very little sound. The hum of strings or a rumble of drums sometimes. Sometimes those flautists try to brush past your ears and you feel alone. You see that little red weighted bird toy, pecking away at nothing on the dinner table. The dinner table that looks like the one you remember in the film was where John Hurt… Gave birth.

Something moves and you think this is it. But there is nothing on the tracker. It is the little bobbing toy, sitting by a light, casting a shadow.

Being Ripley

You press to cut open the hatch so you can open the door. I glance at my own hands on the game controller. They are pale, long thin fingers, no nail polish, chewed nails. Amanda Ripley's hands too are like this. They look like my hands and they are cutting open a door. I am much more touched than I'd like. In fact, there's a real sense of relief. They are her hands. They look like my hands. This is an odd sensation. Perhaps the game has faith in my ability to survive this nightmare.

Something happens. Everything goes wrong. This wing is breaking apart; and now there's a green blip on the tracker. The alarms are going off, a fire alarm mixed with an air raid siren. It's closing on me. They tell me the key is to go slow: this is the risk and reward mechanism they know is against all human nature. They tell me it can't see me if I go slow. They tell me if it sees me it's lethal.

It's on my radar. It's far across the room. I don't want to look at it. It's tall, black by the shadows, it stalks the compartments of the space station slowly until it senses my movement. There is a locker over there on the right. I run to it and shut myself in. And I sit there, the lights flashing and the alarms picking at me and I bring up the motion tracker: it is half a metre away. A quarter. A centimetre.

Through the slits I can see its dainty shark teeth in the horrible silver grin, the shine of the lights on its elongated black skull. It's looking at me. I press to hold my breath. I pull back on the stick to lean away from the locker door. It's going to rip me out of here, I think. It's going to smash my skull back into my brain.

Finally, it leaves. My vision is blurry. My motion tracker suggests its stalking pattern has gone back to normal; it is moving away from me. Satisfied, I get out of the locker and feel sheepish for hiding and I start to walk towards my destination on the tracker.

The blip comes back, rounding on me. I should go slow, I think. No sudden movements. The blip gets closer. Go slow, I say to myself. Slow. Baby steps. Slower. But it's right behind me. It's right behind me. I can hear its feet on the floor. It's coming here.

I can see the door. I can see the door. If I run I can make it. I'm going to do that thing that you know you can't do but I feel like the goal is right there.

I run. My hands grab the door release.

The tail plunges through my stomach - Amanda's stomach - whatever - and the screen goes black.

"It can see you if you move quickly," one of the developers says.

Yes, I think. Well done you bastards. Well done.

• Alien: Isolation is released on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in late 2014