Unlike the majority of Alien games, which tend to draw inspiration from the action-heavy James Cameron sequel, Isolation is about survival instead of shooting. It takes place 15 years after the original film (you play as Ripley's daughter Amanda), and there's only one alien in the whole game. The problem: you're trapped on a space station with it. The experience revolves around trying to survive against an enemy you can't kill. You can hide in lockers, throw flares as a distraction, or even pull out a flamethrower to keep it at bay, but it only takes a few seconds for the alien to pierce your guts in a horrifying death sequence.

The game is completely terrifying.

But turning that concept into a game was a somewhat radical idea. Few, if any, video games rely so heavily on a single enemy to drive the experience. In the case of Isolation, if the alien didn't work properly, then neither would the game. The xenomorph became the focal point of the development process, and the team had few comparable examples to draw inspiration from. "We had to start from scratch," says Hope. "We'd never made anything like this before."

"We couldn't motion capture an alien."

The obvious starting point was the movie itself; the team analyzed every aspect of Alien to figure out the key components that made the creature so scary. "One of the things for me was trying to recapture the sense of mystery for the alien," explains Hope. "When you watch the first film, that creature feels like it's really, really intelligent and almost omnipresent and could appear at any point. That was one of the things that we really wanted to capture, the sense that this thing could appear out of nowhere."

That's much easier to do in a movie, where the director has control over every little thing the viewer sees. Game designers don't have that same luxury. Isolation isn't a tightly scripted experience; it unfolds in a dynamic way that’s different depending on how you play. It's possible for players to see the alien at virtually any point in the game, so in order to feel real, the creature needs to behave as a xenomorph would at all times, or else it breaks the illusion. In the game, the creature hunts you primarily through sight and sound — if you knock something over, it will come to investigate the noise — and Hope says that its personality was based largely on predatory cats. "This thing moves around cautiously and confidently, in a very considered way, a bit like a big cat," he explains. "When they do go in for a kill, they're explosive, and it's over very quickly."

That meant building a complex animation system from scratch — "we couldn't motion capture an alien, unfortunately" — as well as an artificial intelligence that seems both cunning and unpredictable. To ensure the alien is terrifying, it’s important that you never quite know exactly what it will do. "It instills fear in the player," Hope explains, "and makes them doubt what their next action is."