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Posted on October 10, 2014, Phil Hornshaw Storytime: That Alien: Isolation Lore Plot Hole is Actually an Homage

Storytime is a recurring series in which we analyze the storytelling found in video games by looking at the elements that form those stories, the messages they deliver, and the people who create them.

Spoiler Alert: Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Don’t read this article if you’re hoping to get through the Alien: Isolation story campaign without spoilers. We’re about to spoil everything.

In creating Alien: Isolation, developer The Creative Assembly put a serious emphasis on making a game that focused on the experience of the 1979 film Alien, rather than that of Aliens, James Cameron’s sequel.

Most video games in the Alien pantheon have looked to Cameron’s more burly, action-focused story, about overconfident space marines getting ravaged by xenomorphs, for inspiration, with varying degrees of success in adapting its ideas. For Isolation, CA wanted to avoid all the trappings of Cameron’s film — and that meant dialing back to an earlier Alien history and actively leaving out a lot of the elements of Cameron’s film that weren’t in the original Ridley Scott vision.

That gets interesting when you work through Alien: Isolation’s story and hit one particular spot. It’s deep in the game, after players have dealt with Sevastopol Station’s single alien enemy a number of times. In order to ratchet up the intensity, something rather big happens.

Last spoiler warning.

Protagonist Amanda Ripley discovers that the alien, which has been free on the station for a week or more, has created a new nest, complete with eggs, in the bowels of Sevastopol. Everyone the alien has carried off has been brought there, and, of course, this leads to an intense and ridiculous increase in pressure as new aliens hatch from facehugged bodies and start terrorizing the station, and Ripley works to deal with the nest. Sevastopol was dangerous with just one of these things running around, and as the game moves toward conclusion, there are suddenly an unknown number with which to contend.

But casual and even more hardcore Alien fans might be wondering how exactly all this works. From a lore standpoint, there’s a lot about the xenomorph that’s undefined, or picked up in random bits of fiction like novels, games and comics that aren’t considered canon. In a strict focus on the films, the audience is introduced to the alien lifecycle only in an incomplete way in Alien: egg makes facehugger, facehugger makes chestburster, chestburster grows up to become adult alien. But where do the eggs come from?

So where do the alien eggs come from that make a nest even possible?

In terms of the film canon, that question is answered in Cameron’s Aliens with the queen. It’s a giant, egg-laying alien and with it, the structure of alien life begins to mirror certain insects, like ants or bees. How exactly a queen comes to be isn’t covered in Aliens, although in Alien 3, Ripley intrinsically seems to know that (spoiler) the particular alien growing inside her chest is a queen.

That leaves a bit of a question when it comes to Alien: Isolation, though. A single alien makes its way to Sevastopol inside the body of Foster, a member of the salvage crew that locates the Nostromo flight recorder and kicks off the game’s story. The creature that runs around the station, killing folks and dragging them away, has been that first alien that came out of Foster — which is just like the alien that exploded from Kain’s chest in Alien.

But it’s not a queen, so where do the alien eggs come from that make a nest even possible?