A horror game must be a hard thing to demo in a short span of time, with little opportunity to set up any stakes or tension and truly earn any thrills. But kudos to SEGA and Creative Assembly for giving it a go anyway, ushering myself and other media into an almost-pitch-black basement wherein lie a row of cozy, isolated booths running preview builds of Alien Isolation 2.
Having only just seen the announcement at Summer Game Fest, there was a lot of mystery still surrounding this game, and a level of excitement within the first few minutes of play as I took my tentative first few steps in this new breed of Alien game world – planetside, boots on the ground. Playing as new character, Blake, the game kicks off with your crew of Weyland-Yutani surveyors investigating a crashed craft that just happens to be a piece of the Sevastopol space station that was jettisoned at the end of the first game. You know, the one with a goddamn Xenomorph inside of it. Yay!
This first portion sets up what will be a major new component of Alien Isolation 2, the hostile outdoor environment of this colony planet, a place lashed by wet and wild storms and made up of winding forest paths and enough death-defying peril on its own without a killer alien potentially traipsing around the place. The crew is out to recover salvage from the crashed lab, worried enough about the impending stormfront but completely unaware that busting it open could lead to something even worse on their tail. Still, after getting to grips with the game’s controls and experiencing the awe-inspiring sights and sounds of this volatile ecosystem, it’s time to go spaceship spelunking.
Once inside the lab, things become immediately more reminiscent of the first game. Here, I was tip-toeing my way around these abandoned workspaces, collecting scrap in order to repair a power module and start opening some doors. I’m not sure I necessarily needed to be quiet at this early stage, certainly Blake had no idea she was sharing quarters with a Xenomorph at that moment in time, but the instinct kicked in as soon as I was within these – eerily familiar – corridors.
Once again, the atmosphere of these spaces is terrific. Despite falling back on something we’d seen in the original game, the simple switch from this lab being attached to a station in cold, silent space, to a crash-landed wreck on a stormy planet surface, is a noticeable change. Unnerving silence gives way to the thunderous sound of rain on the outer levels, a sound that slowly beings to dampen the further you move inward, reminding you that any semblance of an escape path is becoming increasingly distant.
The lab is dark, and its clearly been thrown around a bit, but there’s enough here to work with. Your physical relationship with the environment and facilities around is once again an important one, Creative Assembly getting even more detailed and intricate with its animations as Blake repairs switchboards or waits for one of the manual save stations to update from a keycard. I find a couple of flares, and I have my trusty flashlight handy, but I try my best to conserve those resources while things still feel relatively safe.
At one point the game attempts a jump scare as a bisected Working Joe android grabs Blake by the legs and mouths off about “safety procedures,” but I know that I’m still essentially in the tutorial component of this game, so I’m already expecting it to try and set me up for these things. When the big nasty does eventually show up, a little more of that fear and tension does start to kick in, but hiding under desks and crawling through vents is a dance we’ve all done before and I have not forgotten the steps.
As I circled back toward the point at which I entered, my own terrible sense of direction combined with a canned sequence in which my path became cut off by a chemical fire, the Xenomorph stalked. The audiovisual design of this thing is still impeccable, its steps echoing around the narrow halls of steel and its shadow cast in worrying scale as it brushes by incidental light sources. Creative Assembly’s big triumph with the original Alien Isolation was in so deftly obfuscating the mechanical intricacies of the alien, selling the simulation so well that players wouldn’t fall back on game logic as much as their real fight-or-flight instinct. Or… just flight, as it were. It’s been assured that this thing is still very much unkillable.
A bit more vent crawling and a quick shut-off of the vents causing those nasty flames, and I had a clear path to freedom. Well, clear enough as a view from back inside the safety of those vents can provide. I knew the Xenomorph could still get me from in here if I managed to give myself away, so I spent the rest of the demo moving carefully, peeking as well as I could through any open grates and praying that when I eventually decided to put my entire head out it wouldn’t be met with the cold, black maw of my new friend. And so as I watched (and heard) an automatic door close behind it at the other end of the hall, I made my fast escape. Cue a canned sequence in which the thing rushes me and I narrowly make it out of the hatch and back into the outside world.
And that’s it! Demo over. It’s an interesting choice, handing the media and creators in attendance what is essentially the most benign portion of the game, especially after having gone to all the effort of creating a mood in the physical space. The team had even set up night-vision cameras at each station to record our reactions, for later marketing or just for our own reference and enjoyment. I felt bad for barely emoting – an existing quirk of mine as it is – so I tried to feign some winces and wide-eyed stares toward the end there for the reel.
As a tease for what’s to come, though, that first walk on the planet’s surface does a terribly good job of selling the atmosphere that Alien Isolation 2 promises. I can only assume a cadence of sequences moving in and out of different structures over the course of the game, and I’m sure I’ll dread every single time I’m forced back out in the wind and rain, where the Xenomorph has even more opportunity to hide and stalk me from every direction. I’m incredibly intrigued to see more of what this sequel has in store, but for now it’s clear that it at least maintains the atmosphere of the original while adding in a whole new type of environment to contend with a fuck-off huge alien in.
Previewed during Summer Game Fest Play Days | Alien Isolation 2 launches at an unannounced date for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2 and PC.