#SDCC - San Diego Comic Con - We've played Alien Isolation!

By David Massey & Adam Ruhl

Adam: (spoilers)

Sega has set up two booths at comic con, one in the exhibit hall where a player plays in a giant egg:

And a 14 seat booth in the Padres stadium where we played:

Alien Isolation is set to come out on multiple platforms on October 7th and it is a masterpiece. They have been trying to put out a good Alien game for 15 years and have finally scored!

Also finally we get a game that follows Alien and not Aliens. The very first thing that struck me was how clear the image is. I played it on ps4 and it was like really being there; probably the first example I've seen where in-game footage lives up to the cut scenes and commercials. 

The plot that I could see was that a flight recorder from the nostromo was discovered and taken to a space station. You're Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley's daughter, sent to retrieve it. When you get there everyone's dead and there's and alien loose.

The game is scary as hell, you're creeping through the these great sets and play cat and mouse with an alien you can't kill. It was a terrifying experience. We got to play one demo level and if you survived it you got a t-shirt.

David:

Got a chance to test drive Sega's new Alien Isolation game (due out in October) and from what little I saw, I gotta say that I am impressed and terrified. Instead of leaning on James Cameron's para-military alien-verse, I don't expect guns ever come into play in this first-person "shooter". In fact, we're told from screen-1 that you cannot kill the Alien.  

This is Ridley Scott's Alien and the atmosphere is pulled straight from the last 20 minutes of his 1979 film with your character sneaking through an abandoned space station with little more than a motion tracker and welding torch. I'm no great fan of the sneaking-genre of gaming - I want to jump on mushrooms and punch bricks - but the 10 min or so that I played just made me want more. This is a game of creeping shadows, taunting sounds, and being ripped from the cubby hole you're hiding in and gloriously mauled!