Some Fears Never Leave the Vents

The Summer Game Fest reveal of Alien: Isolation 2 did the usual thing, which is to say, build a great deal of hype without showing much of anything. Driven by intense music and lightning-fast edits, the trailer offers no release date—only the promise that Creative Assembly and Sega are taking us back into the fray.

And I am excited, if reluctantly so.

The setting’s moved off the Sevastopol and onto a storm-ravaged colony world, a Weyland-Yutani outpost called Kurosaki Station. Much of the trailer takes place outdoors, fueling speculation that the game itself will be set largely outside.

I don’t think that will happen, and I expect the game will find ways to recapture the claustrophobic feel of the first game.

But watching it, I didn’t actually think about Isolation at all. I thought about my old chunky grey PlayStation, my CRT in the corner, and a game from 1996 that frightened me. Badly.

Alien Trilogy.

Probe Entertainment, Acclaim, thirty levels and three queens, a first-person shooter built on the back of Acclaim’s much-hyped motion capture and digitized sprites. But it felt… rudimentary. Dated even.

The corridors were a soup of muddy textures, the aliens were flat cardboard cutouts that swelled up as they lurched toward you and the level layouts were a maze I’d (often) get lost in. Probably my biggest pet-peeve about shooters from this generation.

When the previews went to publication in 1996, it was a game that felt like it was already creaking, a game that looked as though it was running on the 3DO or Atari Jaguar. By any sane measure it should have been forgettable.

But it wasn’t. A friend brought it around during the dark winter months and, frankly, it put a fear in me that has never once let go.

Because the genius of it, intentional or not, was that the clumsiness didn't really matter all that much. Not when you're eleven and the Aliens from that universe are one of the most terrifying creature designs ever put to screen.

The franchise, as usual, did the heavy lifting.

Apparently the team sampled the films directly, the screeches and the hiss, and worst of all the cocooned colonists whispering kill me out of the walls as you passed. That left an impression on me.

What I carry from it more than anything was just how relentless the game was. The xenomorphs in Alien Trilogy did not stop.

They came as flat sprites swelling out of the dark, one after another after another, and you’d empty the pulse rifle into them and another would be on you before the last one dropped. Then you’d be left with the pistol and the pistol didn’t really do much of anything.

That relentlessness was pure 90s shooter design.

Nothing from that era was anything other than run and gun, far as I can tell. More enemies, then more enemies again. At no point did you ever feel you were winning, you were surviving just long enough to learn the next room was packed with even more of the wee bastards.

Alien taught me that space is a haunted house with no doors and Aliens made one nightmare into a tide of them. By the third film I’d stopped expecting anyone to survive. And then a rough little PlayStation shooter made me live all three, badly rendered and barely holding together.

I guess most childhood terrors wear off and you revisit them as an adult and laugh. They’ve shrunk, gone a bit naff, all rubber and seams. You’re too deep into the nature and reality of the world around you to find Aliens scary, right?

Well, not me. This game, and the entire franchise, instills a deep-rooted fear in me.

When I load it up, the dread’s still there, intact, untouched by thirty years. The relentlessness, the whispering, and the knowledge that the thing in the next corridor would never, ever quit.

But still, I look on in admiration. I’ll watch every trailer they put out for Isolation 2.

I’ll read every preview and when it finally arrives, sometime in the future, I’ll buy it and I’ll play it through my fingers, the same way I played a clumsy, dated, deeply frightening scrappy shooter through my fingers all those years ago.