There’s a moment in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien where Ellen Ripley screams out “you BITCH!” before slamming her flamethrower down onto a computer monitor in frustration. It’s the first ‘bitch’ she utters in the Alien series, although certainly not the most iconic; that award goes to the ultra slick, James Cameron-penned line from 1986’s much more bombastic Aliens.

It does, however, encapsulate the sort of explosive fear and exasperation both Ripley and the audience are feeling after 90 odd minutes of a brutal game of cat and mouse. It is a predictable response from Ripley considering her circumstances. It is also a predictable response to have while playing Alien: Isolation , the Creative Assembly-created horror game that serves as a bridge between the two films, but is firmly set in Scott’s world; the tense, taut and extremely unforgiving one.

Alien: Isolation is not an immediately easy game to like. I can understand most of the criticisms I’ve read about it, including those in IGN’s review. It has pacing issues, and hard mode hones AI in on you so viciously and erratically it’s almost laughably challenging, and once or twice it forgets its own mission statement and throws up shooter cliches into its decidedly non-shooter world.

But I think it is a bold game, one that takes enormous risks; and in the AAA space, where games fight for the largest slice of the audience and so often end up homogeneous as a result, this is to be celebrated. It flips what we have come to expect from a sci-fi AAA game entirely on its head by eschewing bloodsoaked fantasy fulfillment - the ubiquitous tent-pole of basically every game of the same ilk ever - in order to give the player an experience that is properly in step with its source material.

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Simulating Horror

Alien: Isolation is, as Frictional Games’ Thomas Grip discusses in his excellent blog post “Thoughts on Alien: Isolation and Horror Simulation,” a ‘horror simulator’; a somewhat unpopular sub-genre of video game horror that favours emulation of horrific experiences above all else. Entertainment, in other words, takes a backseat to pure scares.

A good horror simulator is very hard to pull off. Go too far one way, and it’s too frustrating, too far the other, and it doesn't feel much like a game. In the mainstream space, most developers working in horror have tended to go down a safer route, ‘wrapping’ their otherwise action/adventure-oriented games in a horror theme. The odd indie effort aside - Outlast, Slender, Grip's own Amnesia: the Dark Descent - the majority of horror games coming out of big publishing houses in the last couple of decades - many slipperily-defined ‘survival horrors’ among them - have been run and gunners dressed in blood and gore.

Hold your breath.

Punk Rock

It's almost TOO quiet...

The Perfect Organism

You'll see this a lot.

“Resident Evil does tons of things to crank of the level of scariness; scarce ammunition, inventory management, limited saves, etc,” explains Grip, on the difference between a game with a horror ‘wrapper’ and a horror simulator. “But none of these give rise to any specific horror scenarios; the game is still all about shooting various enemies in order to progress.“When you play a game like Resident Evil, every encounter is a very tactical and precise decision. You look at what kind of opponent you are facing, what weapons you have, the current ammo supply, health levels, etc. The model in your head is much less about the appearance of the creatures, and much more about pure numbers.”Such detached thinking can keep any horror experience at arm’s length, because we ultimately understand that behind the fangs there is a system, and that system can be manipulated. A horror simulator, on the other hand, provides no such comfort.“(A horror simulator has) plenty of verbs that are related to a horror movie: hide under bed, looking into mirror, run away, push monster, etc. As the player plays the game, they reenact scenes of horror simply by following the rules set out by the gameplay.“Your mind is racing with trying to predict future happenings. Combine this with a map that forces you to think yourself as part of the environment, and monsters that you mostly keep track of by inferring their position, and you get a mental model that is far more horror-like and vivid.”The Creative Assembly decided it was going to risk its reputation, a license, and a whole lot of money by eschewing the familiar style adapted by many other horror pioneers - Capcom, Visceral Games, Monolith - to make a 25-hour horror simulator in the pursuit of an authentic ‘Alien’ experience. It was very - dare I say it - punk rock of them."I’m not sure we ever looked at it as anti-establishment," Isolation's Creative Director Alistair Hope tells me. "We were simply trying to deliver a new game experience."The result is a game that feels nothing like a game by bucking against our expectations at every turn. Most games cannot bear silence and inactivity, for example, throwing random firefights or insistent HUD directives at the fear that the player might get bored/not know what they’re meant to do in this part, but Alien: Isolation is very content to let you wander around long, white uneventful space stations for stretches at a time. It reminds you that your presence here might be - gasp! - incidental; an almost unheard of notion in the player-worshipping AAA space."For me Alien: Isolation is about the whole of the player’s journey from the explosive Alien and other enemy encounters to the quieter moments when the player is alone," says Hope. "We had to let the player have this range of experiences to provide contrast in pace and tone - the tension wouldn’t be effective if it was always set to 11. We also wanted the player to really feel inside the world of Sevastopol – trapped inside this incredibly beautiful, unique lo-fi sci-fi Seventies view of a used future: a truly immersive but dangerous ‘pressure cooker’ with no easy means of escape. For the atmosphere and environment to really get inside the player's head - to exist as much inside the player’s imagination as on the screen."It’s interesting to read how many people dream about Alien: Isolation after playing. So I guess we succeeded."Enemy AI builds upon the idea of your presence as incidental and insignificant, in sofar as hostiles react with unpredictable temperament, and their lives and deaths are ultimately meaningless within Isolation’s ecosystem. When humans and androids do attack, they do so without ceremony. Androids walk calmly towards you, and you are offered no in-game pop up or reward for their usually messy and uncoordinated deaths. Certain humans won’t attack at all, and will instead run past you in crazed fear, or cower behind cover. He doesn’t care about you, the game whispers in your ear, nobody does.While we eventually do learn how to defeat these hostiles, there is no way to predict the movements of Isolation's trump card: the alien; no way to game the system of this incredible omnipresent boss. Isolation's 'perfect organism' - and it really is - presents opportunities for killer emergent gameplay: it can completely destroy 40 minutes of careful progress in a fell swoop, or stay hidden, unnervingly so, in the vents for long stretches. It can gut you from behind while you save your game, or curl down quietly while you’re in the middle of solving a puzzle.The Creative Assembly could have orchestrated it, of course. Set its course and behaviour that we could memorise and manipulate. We would have played that Alien game without question, and likely enjoyed it. But then, that wouldn't have been true to Ripley's experience."We knew that choreographing the Alien, moment to moment, wasn’t going to deliver the experience we wanted," says Hope. "If the player could predict what was going happen all fear would be lost and the tension would evaporate. So we decided to let the Alien’s senses drive its behaviour. It’s looking and listening for the player, making its decisions based on what it knows about the world around it."And of course, Isolation's alien is impossible to ‘beat’. You feel as if you ought to be able to, because Amanda Ripley is controlled very traditionally: she can run, she can crouch, she can throw items and wield weapons; but Isolation refuses to indulge these abilities in any significant way. At your most empowered, a flame thrower can keep the alien away for a minute or two, but generally you’ll spend most of your time cowering in a locker or hiding under a gurney with your breath held, blacking out from exertion ever so slowly.

It can be frustrating, the business of constantly running for your life and hiding in tiny spaces. To add insult to injury, Alien: Isolation spaces out save stations, so when you die, you lose chunks of progress along the way. I ask Hope about this feature in particular, considering manual saves are such a relic; a hangover from a time when games catered to a much smaller and more forgiving audience.

Looking Ahead

"One of the other key aspects of horror for me is the concept of ‘small victories’," says Hope. "Small events or achievements that, if the player manages to make it to the next one, they might just ultimately survive."We experimented with a range of save systems, from automatic checkpoints through to players manual saving but kept coming back to the manual saves as they were such a powerful addition to the horror experience. With the manual saves Amanda and the player’s goals are aligned – they both need find them and reach them safely in order to survive. It totally tapped into the idea of ‘small victories’ in a really tangible, meaningful way. It also provides a moment for the player to breath a sigh of relief, to reflect on their journey to that point, before embarking again into the unknown."Considering Isolation's unapologetic brutality, did SEGA at any point sit Hope down and say "listen pal, are people actually going to enjoy this experience?""I think we’ve been in an incredibly fortunate position. Sega and Twentieth Century Fox have both been extremely supportive of the vision and the original proposition from day one and throughout development I’ve felt like we’ve had creative control over our decisions and freedom to explore new ideas and areas within the universe. In creative terms, perhaps we made an indie game with AAA backing? Which, I guess, would be different."But I think the key here was belief, which I think is absolutely critical, so even when we couldn’t talk or show anyone what we were making we continued to believe in the end goal. It was also reassuring when we were able to show work in progress demos behind closed doors the feedback was always massively positive."I guess it came down to everyone internally and externally believing in the vision and the choices we made to deliver on it."Whatever you think of Isolation, it's hard to argue that it doesn't deliver on that tension in the latter half of Scott's film. Playing it, I keep coming back to the moment when Ripley slams down her flamethrower onto a computer monitor, cursing uselessly at a non-sentient A.I. program. You bitch, I've thought after being gutted for the fifteenth time. You utter bitch.Isolation gives me an enormous sense of hope for AAA development moving forward. It shows that these sorts of visions can be born within a big studio system and come through unfettered. I ask Hope if he's proud of its individuality."It feels like we’ve moved the genre, broken new ground and that’s really, really exciting, satisfying and worthwhile. It feels like we made a meaningful Alien game. So yes! We feel proud. We set out to make the best Alien game ever made and we feel like we achieved it and more. It feels like we’ve done something important."I think it’s a really exciting time to be making games full stop. New platforms, new delivery methods, new ideas, new collaborations and new technology like VR which is opening up completely new possibilities."For horror, I hope the horror games renaissance continues and continues to show that players can have meaningful, engaging mainstream experiences that don’t simply center on pulling a trigger to kill or clear."Meaningful experiences which engage the imagination and take players on their own journeys to tell their own individual stories."

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.