Alien: Isolation is a 2014 survival horror game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. Based on the Alien film series, the game is set 15 years after the original 1979 film, and follows the engineer Amanda Ripley, voiced by Andrea Deck. Amanda investigates the disappearance of her mother, Ellen Ripley, aboard the space station Sevastopol, which is in disarray due to years of corporate negligence and the threat of a rampant alien creature. The game emphasizes stealth gameplay, requiring the player to avoid, outsmart, and fight enemies with an assortment of tools and weapons.
Alien: Isolation was designed to resemble the original Alien film rather than its more action-oriented 1986 sequel Aliens, and features a similar lo-fi, 1970s vision of what the future could look like. It runs on an engine built to accommodate the alien's behaviour and technical aspects such as atmospheric and lighting effects. Creative Assembly intended to make Alien: Isolation a third-person game, but used first-person to create a more intense experience. Several downloadable content packs were released, some of which relive scenes from the original film.
Alien: Isolation received positive reviews and sold over two million copies by May 2015. Its retro-futuristic art direction, sound design, and artificial intelligence were praised, while its length received some criticism. Considered one of the best games ever made, Alien: Isolation won several year-end awards, including Best Audio at the 2015 Game Developers Choice Awards and Audio Achievement at the 11th British Academy Games Awards. It saw ports to Linux and OS X in 2015, Nintendo Switch in 2019, and Android and iOS mobile devices in 2021. It was also added to the Amazon Luna service in 2021. A web series adaptation was released in 2019. A sequel, Alien: Isolation 2, was announced in 2024 and formally revealed in 2026.
Gameplay
Alien: Isolation is a single-player action-adventure game with an emphasis on stealth and survival horror. The player controls Amanda Ripley from a first-person perspective, and must explore a space station and complete mission objectives to progress forward in the story while avoiding, outsmarting, and defeating enemies. Specific objectives vary across each of the nineteen missions, but can range from activating computers, talking to NPCs, collecting certain items or reaching specific areas. The player can run, climb ladders, sneak into vents, crouch behind objects to break the line of sight with enemies, and peek over or lean around for a safe view. The player also has the ability to go under tables or inside empty lockers and cabinets to hide from enemies.
Amanda encounters various enemies throughout the station, including hostile human survivors and androids. The player can either eliminate them or avoid them using stealth or distractions. The main antagonist, the Alien (or otherwise referred to by the game's characters as "The Creature"), appears briefly during certain sections across the first four missions, but begins continuously pursuing the player after the completion of mission five, "The Quarantine". The Alien cannot be defeated, requiring the player to use stealth tactics in order to survive. Instead of following a predetermined path, the Alien has the ability to actively investigate disturbances and hunt the player by sight or sound. Along the way, the player can use both a flashlight and a motion tracker to detect the Alien's movements. However, using any of these increases the chance of the Alien finding the player. For example, if the Alien is close enough, it will be attracted by the tracker's sound, forcing the player to use the tracker wisely and remove it as soon as it detects motion. The motion tracker cannot detect enemies when they are not moving and cannot determine if the Alien is up in the ducts or on ground level. On the game's hardest difficulty setting, Nightmare, the motion tracker is unreliable and the in game mini-map, used to navigate and locate objectives, is unavailable.
Although Amanda gains access to a revolver, shotgun, bolt gun, flamethrower, and stun baton over the course of the game, Alien: Isolation emphasizes evasion over direct combat by providing limited ammunition. The player can also craft useful items by collecting schematics and different materials. Items include EMP detonators, noisemakers, molotov cocktails, and pipe bombs; these can help the player deal with enemies. For example, the noisemaker can be used to attract enemies in a particular direction. The Alien is afraid of fire, so using flame weapons will force it to temporarily retreat. The player has a limited amount of health which decreases when attacked by enemies; health is restored with medkits, which can be crafted with materials in Amanda's inventory, although all of the Alien's attacks (unless it is retreating) will result in instant death.
The space station is divided into sections connected by trams and elevators. Some doors require certain actions before entry is allowed; for example, some require a keycard or entry codes, while others need to be hacked by an access tuner or cut open with a welding torch. Computer terminals and rewiring stations can be used to access information and trigger actions such as disabling security cameras or manipulating the station's air-purification and alarm mechanism. These actions may help to momentarily divert the attention away from the player's position. To save game progress, the player needs to locate a save station terminal and insert Amanda's access card. There is a three second pause before the save can be completed, meaning the player can be killed while attempting to save. If Amanda dies, the player will have to restart from the last saved point. In addition to the campaign mode, Alien: Isolation features a special mode, called Survivor Mode, in which the player must complete objectives within a time limit on different challenge maps while being hunted by the Alien.
Plot In 2137, fifteen years after Ellen Ripley went missing onboard the USCSS Nostromo, her daughter Amanda Ripley learns from Weyland-Yutani android Christopher Samuels that the Nostromos flight recorder has been recovered and taken to Sevastopol, a space station owned by Seegson Corporation which orbits the gas giant KG-348 in the Zeta Reticuli system. Samuels offers Amanda a place on the retrieval team to give her closure, and she accepts. Amanda, Samuels and Weyland-Yutani executive Nina Taylor travel to the station via the USCSS Torrens with the help of the ship's captain Diane Verlaine. After finding the station too damaged to dock, the trio attempt to enter it via a spacewalk, but their EVA line is severed by an explosion, and Amanda is separated from the others.
Making her way through the station, Amanda discovers that it has descended into chaos due to the presence of a hostile alien creature onboard. She eventually finds the flight recorder, but discovers that its data has been corrupted. Amanda then makes her way to Samuels and Taylor; retrieving medical supplies for an injured Taylor, she meets Marshal Waits and follows him back to his bureau. There, Amanda meets the imprisoned captain of the USCSS Anesidora, Henry Marlow, who explains he recovered the flight recorder and went to LV-426, where his wife was impregnated by a facehugger before she fatally birthed the creature on Sevastopol. Waits convinces Amanda to lure the creature to one of the station's modules, where it can be ejected into space. However, Waits ejects the module with Amanda still inside, forcing her to space-jump back to Sevastopol using a space suit.
Amanda returns to the bureau to confront Waits, but before she arrives Sevastopol's service androids begin killing the remaining humans, including Waits. Working with Waits' deputy Ricardo, Amanda links up with Samuels, who sacrifices himself to help her access the control core of Sevastopol's artificial intelligence APOLLO and is destroyed in the process. Amanda also learns from Ricardo that Taylor was secretly sent to retrieve the creature and freed Marlow. At the core, Amanda discovers Weyland-Yutani purchased Sevastopol from Seegson before she arrived at the station, ordering APOLLO to protect the creature at all costs. Amanda informs APOLLO that the creature is no longer onboard, but it responds by stating that "reactor scans are unverified". Descending into the reactor, Amanda finds a nest with numerous aliens, and initiates a reactor purge in an attempt to destroy it. However, this inadvertently forces the aliens to leave the nest, and they begin to hunt Amanda again.
Ricardo informs Ripley that Marlow has returned to the Anesidora, and she follows him. There, Amanda discovers a personal message from Ellen before being confronted by Marlow, who attempts to overload the ship's reactor to destroy Sevastopol and the aliens. Taylor, who also went to the Anesidora, knocks out Marlow but is too late to stop the overload and both are killed in the subsequent explosion, forcing Amanda to flee the ship before it is destroyed. The explosion damages Sevastopol's orbital stabilizers, causing the station to slowly drift into KG-348's atmosphere. Amanda contacts Verlaine for extraction, but a facehugger attacks Ricardo, forcing her to leave him. After helping the Torrens detach from the station, Amanda enters the ship just before Sevastopol is destroyed. However, she finds an alien has boarded the Torrens and killed Verlaine as well; cornered into an airlock, she ejects both herself and it into space. Some time later, a searchlight finds an adrift and unconscious Amanda.
Development
Alien: Isolation was developed by Creative Assembly, which is best known for their work on the Total War strategy video game series. A game based on the Alien series from 20th Century Fox was conceived when Creative Assembly finished Viking: Battle for Asgard in 2008, after the publisher, Sega, acquired the rights to develop Alien games in December 2006. A six-person team developed the first prototype to pitch the idea, wherein one player would control the Alien manually while another would conceal themselves in an environment and try to hide from the creature. The game captured the attention of Sega and the project was eventually approved. As Creative Assembly had no experience with survival horror games, it hired people from studios such as Bizarre Creations, Black Rock, Crytek, Ubisoft, and Realtime Worlds. According to the director, Alistair Hope, the team grew from "a couple of guys crammed in with the Total War team" to 100 by 2014.
Creative Assembly designed the game more in line with Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien than James Cameron's more action-oriented 1986 sequel Aliens. To help them authentically recreate the atmosphere of the film, Fox provided three terabytes of original production material, including costume photography, concept art, set design, photos, videos and sound effects. The artist John Mckellan said, "It was a proper gold mine. We saw angles of things we'd never seen before." During the first stage of development, the developers deconstructed the film to find out what made its setting unique. This would allow them to build new environments that were faithful to it. The composers deconstructed the film soundtrack to identify the main cues and extend the soundtrack to fill in the length of the game. The developers also met the Alien and Blade Runner editor Terry Rawlings, who gave them additional insight.