The Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation may not give you Silent Hills-style scares but it’s still outrageously terrifying, capturing the essence of the first film very well. Of course, many have wondered why the game would require DLC, especially pre-order DLC that allows you to play as the original cast like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in select sequences.
Speaking to Dealspwn, lead designer Gary Napper justified the decision by saying, “We never really set out to make the game of the film. We wanted to make the Alien scary again. We wanted to make the feeling of the first film, but with our own story and our own environment.
“The original film is a couple of hours long and you can’t really translate that to a full videogame without really expanding and retconning a bunch of stuff! We knew we wanted to set it after the first film, we knew we wanted one Alien, so we knew exactly what we wanted to build. For us, it was always ‘this is the game we want to make.’ When we got to feature the original cast, it gave us a couple of options we could do on the side.
“I’d never say that we’re the game of the film, but we definitely recreate the feeling of the first film.”
So while Alien: Isolation is very much it’s own game, the team wanted a chance to imbue some of the old film without directly translating the entire experience. Alien: Isolation will be out this October for PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC so we’ll find out how well this approach works.