Alien Isolation on GOG - gog.la/alien2 Alias Isolation - github.com/aliasIsolation/aliasIsolation/releases It's a dark and smokey game which TH-cam compression does no favors for, but it eternally looks recent to me.
This is a great game, I'm not good with horror, so i could never play it (tried it a few times, never got past the motion detector part), i'm glad some people appreciate the game.
Hey now, as an Aussie it’s not the 7ft carpet pythons that you need to worry about haha. It’s the way smaller eastern browns that give me the willies ;)
it must have been the learned habits of creating AI in war/civilization games applied to the Alien genre, its interesting, makes me wonder what would happen if we had more video game developers jump around genres
@@LouieCartoon strategy games require a lot more effort AI wise for unit pathing and reaction so yeah, that’s probably a good skill that translates well to other genres like horror.
I always found the Working Joes were scarier than anything else in the game. With the alien you know you can't kill it and need to hide. But a blank faced robot briskly walking at your proclaiming it's intentions to help you is horrifying
Fecking YES. The intro where we're in the vent and watch it killing a survivor while claiming the guy should calm down and to let it help him was, in my opinion, downright perfect.
Yeah, the very first time I ever saw the working joe murder that guy in the start of the game, I thought they were horrifying. "You are being hysterical" as he bashes his head against a wall. The game does an amazing job of displaying human emotion, panic, fear vs. the cold indifference of the xeno and androids.
i had a working joe chase me down a hallway to an elevator, the doors closed and just before the elevator began to movie it just…. clipped through the doors anyway and beat me to death. never went from terrified to just 😑 “oh okay” so fast
At one point, I set a Working Joe on fire with the flamethrower. Its response was to simply walk through the flames, sneer “Only animals fear fire” and then slowly strangle me to death. That whole scene made my blood run cold.
I got to learn first-hand that the Alien can get you in the early levels when I accidentally bumped the "swing wrench" button just after getting into that tram you have to wait a long time for. I hit the wall, making noise, and the Alien nearly immediately dropped from a nearby vent and bum rushed me before I could react in time to send the tram off. I didn't just shit a chicken, I shit the whole roost.
I had the same experience, I thought the game was entirely scripted so I was screwing around waiting for that tram to show up. Yeah…..next thing I knew it the alien was right on top of me and scared the crap out of me! I always hide behind those crates near the tram now, learned my lesson haha.
Marlow's encounter with the space-jockey was also key to resolving a plot-hole in the original film series. The crew of the Nostromo visited LV-426 because a signal was detected. Decades later, LV-426 was colonized without finding the derelict until it was too late. So between the two events, the signal was deactivated. Marlow turned it off.
The reason the music syncs so perfectly is because it uses Wwise. Wwise can essentially link specific events in the game to specific parts of music or tracks and dynamically switch between them immediately. Some of the Total War games also use Wwise and it's why the music there so perfectly flows between ambient idle in battle, to more tense build-up during the first charge into the enemy army, into full on battle music after contact is made. All of that is done entirely unscripted obviously and the sound engine itself handles all of it based on what's actually happening in the game. So, the music changing from scary horror running away music to something more intense and action-like when you turn around to fight the alien is because the sound engine picked up your actions and is suiting it. I'm sure other audio engines also use this capability in a similar way, but I've personally modded with Wwise and it was really impressive how easy it was to use and how effective it is too.
I don't think that's exactly it, I think Mandalore was instead attributing coincidental timing to witchcraft (unless Wwise can predict player actions ahead of him)
During my first playthrough, I spent most of the game thinking that the alien couldn't enter the vents and I was safe there. Seeing him suddenly crawling towards me in a vent about 12 hours into the game is probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me in my life.
For me, it was when Outlast's main antagonist, Chris Cheesegraterface, who had opened the locker next to where I was hiding and then left every single time I encountered him, decided to open TWO lockers around the middle of the game (which, of course, was the one I was in). When a game manages to make you think you know how the enemy works, only for it to break through your misconceptions like that is a good game indeed.
you literally see him enter and exit via the vent system, tho. When you're crawling around trying to get from point-A to point- B and not a single person or android is around, that little blip on your tracker moving around is him in the vents.
@@Daniel-Munoz Hey now, Aliens was just as good as Alien and in a lot of ways I consider it a stronger film. But... yeah everything from 3 onward was just bad... Prometheus was good but it's more of a loose spinoff movie than anything else...
I remember being absolutely blown away by the design in this game. The UI felt so diagetic and well put together and really remains a shining example of how set design and UIs should be done.
I had to look up the word “diagetic” and I still don’t understand what it means in the context you’ve used it. Is the word “diegetic”? Even if so, I still don’t get it lol.
I had no idea it was this studio's first run at a first person game. They really knocked it out of the park in a way I didn't think was possible. This will eternally be my favorite survival horror game and I am heart broken that we will likely never see a proper sequel.
It reminds me about how fallen order from respawn was their first attempt at a third person non shooter game, it has some jank but its a damn solid piece of work overall for a first attempt at a new style.
Originally it wasn't even a first person game, it was 3rd person over the shoulder because that was all the rage at the time. At one point they put together a test area with the camera moved into first person and they really liked it, but they had to fight with Sega a bit to convince them to let them shift the game entirely first person.
I have a personal pipe dream that one day they'd use this tech for a remake of Metroid Fusion. Y'know, an AI-driven SA-X. Isolation already had a pretty solid Switch port, too.
I absolutely love this game to death but, I can't agree enough on how stretched out it felt The entire latter half of the game was just me going, "Is this it? is it finally over..?" Only for it to be like, "Nah, bro, you thought Ellen had a rough time? We're not even CLOSE to done." in a way, it kinda made me love the game even more. It really makes you FEEL like the whole universe wants you dead.
The writer is Dan Abnett, he is mostly known for his novels set in the Warhammer 40k Sci fi setting. Which is all about a universe where everyone and everything is out to get you. I think he was a excellent choice for a game like this
@@darkbozo11 I loved Alien Isolation and played it maybe six times. It could have been twice as long, and I've have still been fully engaged. Just love exploring Sevastopol station.
Like Mandalore says, there's plenty of things the devs just barely missed the mark with, but what you get in game has a level of polish I'd love to see in the majority of games coming out now. It's a triumph of horror gaming and I hope future development teams look at this game for how to make interactive systems of conflict integrate with an immersive experience.
Mandalore causally flexing his VHS style editing abilities. That was honestly one of the best, most authentic VFX edits I've seen. I legit felt like I was watching an old VHS.
At 35:43 he has a brief credit saying that Noodle has a setup for the VHS stuff. So he had him actually put a clip onto a VHS tape and record it, rather than just trying to emulate it with editing.
I can't cope with how time is flying as I age. I got into an argument last night with my best friend about whether or not Dragon Age 4 was taking too long to come out. I pointed out that it had only been a couple of years since the last game, Inquisition, had come out, and he looked at me like I'm an idiot and reminded me that it came out in 2014. I couldn't believe that it had been that long.
Seriously. I thought it was pretty funny when Mandy said his computer at the time couldn't run it at highest settings... and I'm still using my same computer from that time. :D
@@ArcaneAzmadi it gets faster... the more your recent past becomes smaller compared ratio wise to your distant past the faster each year begins to feel... for a 5 year old a single year is a 5th of their life, for an 80 year old a year is just a small 80th... as a 44 year old myself, a year now feels like what a few months used to feel like for me in my 20's and compared to how a year felt for me in my pre teens... its like times on a god damn 3x fast forward, Months feel like weeks, weeks like days... Kinda depressing... not to mention your mind starts to ignore remembering larger and larger chunks of experience in long term memory so large parts of a year simply get lost, unlike when decades younger.
Mandy managed to work on two videos at the same time while constantly switching from off the pills to on the pills and delivered them both on the same day - simply amazing.
Without a doubt the most terrifying horror game I have ever played. The atmosphere, the alien itself, the 1980s sci-fi theme, everything is amazing. I always love to talk about the A.I. The Alien uses something called a "Director", which is essentially two AI's working together. One is the A.I. of the Alien itself, and the other is a sort've invisible man guiding and monitoring the player and the Alien, if the stress/activity seems low, it'll up send the Alien to where the player is or make him fall back if he's been near the player too much. It's a brilliant system and is also used by Left 4 Dead 2. All encounters are always different and random which is perfect for a horror game.
plus the director actually tracks how you've been dealing with the alien and will unlock certain abilities for the alien to directly counter your favorite tools
Left 4 Dead is criminally underrated for its AI. This whole Director idea is really solid and something only old Valve could come up with. It's a shame there's only Alien: Isolation that actually iterated on it and used it, at least I can't really think of anything else.
This is probably one of my favorite horror games of all time and seeing this video was a delight. One thing I remember my sibling said about it was that while, "yes the xenomorph is afraid of fire, you can very quickly help it overcome that fear"
I just want to talk about my favorite part of this game. Towards the end of the game you're used to seeing paranoid human survivors who shoot at everything in sight. It's a station full of conflict. But then you get to a small room with a couch and a viewport with view of the planet. There's just one lone human survivor just sitting on the couch and staring out the window. He knows he's going to die and is choosing to accept his death in peace.
One thing I always thought about with the computers and controls used in the world of Alien - in space the more simplified approach would actually make sense. Complex electronics could be more easily damaged by electro magnetic fields. So in some strange way that actually seemed more realistic to me than the hyper complex control systems I've seen in other science fiction. I do realize they were using 70s tech for the movies so that wasn't their reasoning - but it didn't feel to me like the tech was outdated if you get what I mean.
I've heard also that miniaturization is really costly process, so maybe solution for them is to throw all those cheap resources from space minning into big sturdy cheap computers.
Another thing is that in space it's really hard to get rid of heat, as there's no atmosphere to absorb the heat, it has to radiate the heat like the Sun. So using shitty, low power, low heat computers would be ideal as opposed to, say, a 3080 setting the ship or station on fire or eats up all the electricity that's being generated. Sure they might take up a lot of space, but well, you're in space, there's so much room to build a big o'l computer. Not to mention it's probably cheaper to build a factory producing these weaker computers than getting all the tech and expertise to build a stronger computer. Also no gravity means less stress on components means you can cheap out on things like durability and general toughness.
When I was a game dev student, I suggested we do our group project about Alien Isolation. 5 grown adults were put through the ringer... I was the only one that finished the game before we presented our "feature presentation" on it. This game is a jewel of game design and master class in tension/horror building
@@wicked5999 Somehow this is very accurate while being hilarious. I have no fear in horror games, i rarely get startled, most of these games feel very poorly designed to me, lack real tension, the outlast series really didnt make me feel anything... Yet, isolation was so stressfull until you got some means of pushing the xeno away i kept telling myself "why is my butt clenched, and why has it been THAT clenched for 30 minutes ? Is this why i play games ? To muscle my ass and feel terrible while just watching a flat window into the void ? Had to do small sessions for the first time in my life to keep my ass and my mind from solemn soreness.
I actually died to the alien at the first possible opportunity before the tram when I played the game for the first time. When your NPC friend got snatched by it I thought it had been alerted and I needed to run away, but running makes noise that can quickly attract it. I may have actually died a few times before I realized that your ally being eaten didn't actually mean you were in immediate danger and proceeded down to the tram quietly.
I had to pause to get up to get more rum and I noticed that you blurred her feet at 1:30 and that was a level of amusing I wasn't ready for. You are an editing inspiration to us all.
Mandalore echoed a strong sentiment I had with the Alien being terrifying. Suddenly hearing it break out into a sprint with it's loud footsteps was how I first encountered the Alien in this game. It's one of the few times I've frozen in fear (legs like jelly) in a videogame before (maybe next to the doll house in Resident Evil Village). I love horror games so I laughed maniacally afterwards because I loved how strongly that moment got me. I live fully for horror games to constantly challenge my emotions and Isolation will be one of my favourite memories playing it.
25:22 *Thank you!* I swear, 95% of _all_ reviewers, letsplayers and general gaming content creators get this wrong _all the time_ It drove me almost crazy these past few years whenever it came up. _"Make sure to literally have your Motion Sensor up AT ALL TIMES!"_ was one of the highlights
@@bushmonster1702 and you have to use the valve index or at least a headset with large fov to see your detector easily. This game in VR is just insane. The alien nest was so nightmarish
@@153ridzzzz I remember the medical facility is where I started closing my eye just before getting killed. It was just to much at some point. But what a trip. I finished the game entirely in VR. I strongly recommend
I know why the alien keeps patrolling an area. It is because it is walking over oxygen canisters. Those things make noise so it thinks you are making noise. I seem to recall they can be shot to explode too but I try not to make noise which is why I noticed it. Certain rooms have a lot of canisters and if you sorta walk/bump into them and they start rolling, that's like a wrench hit in loudness.
It's a totally different type of game and if you go into it saying "this is going to be shit because it's on a phone" you're certainly going to agree with yourself and decide that it's shit, but there's a short (hour or two) phone game that acts as a mini pseudo-sequel. There's not much to it, but it's only a few bucks and it's the only phone game I didn't uninstall in disgust after about 5 minutes of playing. For what it is, it's very well-made IMO. It's called Alien Blackout or something and I played it on an Android phone like... dunno, 4 years ago.
4:00 Fun fact, the most popular VHS/CRT effect filter was also created by digitally recording a signal from a couple old tape players which were subjected to miscellaneous abuse (magnets, rubbing stuff onto the tape, fiddling with cables and so on). You just can't beat the REAL technical limitations when it comes to these things...
This is definitely one of the best horror games I've played imo. And we will most likely never see such a faithful recreation of the original movie in video game ever again.
the crazy part about this game is when you look at the logic they made for the aliens AI director. it's actually insane to look at. it really is probally one of the better alien games that captures the franchise well.
Yeah, I think Isolation has one of the best AI in games. It often feels like it's a real creature and not just an NPC, although it definitely also still has its shortcomings.
Me seeing it and doing UE5 stuff as a hobby: I wonder if you can bend the Black Board AI design that far lol, I guess you can but you would need to write A LOT of it by hand.
@@rafox66 Yeah overall I think the AI is incredible but sometimes how random it is just makes it kind of annoying. You know I don't need it to walk back and forth in some set pattern like most stealth games but it's just a pain in the ass when the Xeno suddenly goes in a random direction and then you get ganked and have to replay a whole section for the third time, just because the AI randomly done something different. On paper that's so damn cool but in practice it's a bit annoying at times.
there’s something about the visuals of games from 2014 to 2016 that have made them age a lot better than other periods. The artists of that time were doing something really well to the products they were making.
Star Wars Battlefront 2015, for all its flaws, still looks amazing, and I think it captures the look and feel of the original trilogy almost as well this game does for Alien.
I really enjoyed the section where you describe how much detail was poured into the level design. Without having seen the movie I don't think I'd be able to *fully* appreciate it, but it definitely made me watch the rest of the review in full screen to get whatever detail TH-cam left intact. I also really appreciated the part where you went over the limited facial animations and how it was probably an intentional and wise choice to pour that budget into other areas of the game, which is something I probably wouldn't have thought about. Great review!
There's no retro-futuristic aesthetic quite like it. It's as if the 60s/70s Apollo program kept going, and didn't even consider stopping at the moon. Humans became an interstellar civilization on the backs of cassette tapes.
Was there not a setting in which the alien in the game could detect your real voice if you got too startled? Pretty awesome game honestly, even with the flaws. As a massive Alien/Aliens fan, this was a massive love letter.
I remember watching a video of a guy using that feature on stream then giggled because of chat. He was hiding under the table in front of the Alien when it happened.
@@camblongkaras782 The console versions had some cool features that sadly the PC version never got. The PS4 had controller lightbar sync with the motion sensor and was colored green. Sounds like the Kinect on Xbox had the leaning plus alien able to hear your voice.
This is the only horror game where grown ass me had actual nightmares of after playing it. The tension is relentless. Never played another game quite like it.
just wanna say, bc i’ve never seen anyone mention it. but your captions are really good, ik that’s a weird compliment but yours are rlly descriptive and helpful
27:10 - ok. hear me out. Alien: Groundhog Day. You spawn in, open the first door and are MERKED by a xenomorph, but you come back. Over and over and over again. There's a single tightrope series of choices you can make to get to the escape pod. Learn through repetition.
12:39 i was chewing gum while watching this and this scare got me so hard i reflexively took a huge breath in, which actually caused my gum to shoot straight into the back of my throat and i almost choked on it.
I absolutely love the ernesty at the start of these going over the technical issues and fix ups. Like hey, you deserve to enjoy the game, heres some things that may get in your way. Its so nice to know in advance.
I think Axel is a good addition to the story. People always feel more comfortable in company, and you are kind of lulled into a false sense of security before the decent alone. Great video as always 👌 *chef kiss*
Also worth noting that more casual players would likely not pick up all the notes and voice logs and may have less experience with the mechanics of survival-horror games, so having Axel give a quick run-through is useful insurance in that regard
That kind of thing is in almost every horror game actually. Giving you a secure spot or company for a short while before taking it away from you. The "hubs" in Amnesia TTD and Outlast for example. They make you feel safe for a short while, then you progress and it puts the pressure back on you, and you feel it heavier *because* you have been given that break. It's like that "putting a frog in boiling hot water vs putting a frog in warm water and slowly heating it up" thing. The game takes you out of the boiling water to give you a rest, and in the process breaks your developed resistance to fear. Then it throws you back in.
I know it’s not what you meant, but the mobile game Alien Blackout acts as a sequel to the story and is pretty cool. It’s just a completely different style of game
I'm happy it was a commercial disappointment. I don't live in a world where a sequel exists and a bunch of low standard gamers, coping and acting like that it's a masterpiece. Every cheap trick in the book to artificially extend play time is here
@@MellowFungus Sounds like you're the one coping at one of the best horror games of all time and downright the most atmospheric game ever made, period. Fact of the matter is it sold badly because most "gamers" are low attention span zoomers and millenials who need to be actively pandered to if you want to actually make money in this wretched pisspit of an industry. And the fact that Alien Isolation raised a fat middle finger to this new age trope by itself makes it ten times better.
I actually really liked that the story just wouldn't freaking end. Because it's like a nightmare that won't end, you know? You just want it to end, but it won't stop. The shame is that the horror element wears off. But I personally never really thought this game was strong in the horror sense. It was more of a tense game, if that makes sense, not scary. I wasn't scared so much as I was anxious. And I think the game did keep its tension to the end.
I got to the point that I was no longer scared by the alien... just frustrated/annoyed. After that the game lost its appeal. That was 8 years ago. Maybe I'll pick it up again some time. It was a good game, no question there.
Playing games for a good 35 of my 40 years. Have played thousands of games, have completed hundreds. And Isolation makes my top 10 favourite ever. Delighted to see this on my notifications.
@@badbadman9412 Deus Ex (original), Half Life 1, 2, and Episodes, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Final Fantasy VII (original), Mass Effect trilogy, Resident Evil 2 (original), Metal Gear Solid, Prey (2017), Knights of the Old Republic 1/2. Not exactly 10 as I've included some series where multiple games cover the same story. What about yours?
For my top 10s for the time being (my preferences change depending on, say, mood) and since Anthony mentioned some of them (so I won't mention them out of avoiding redundancy), here are these: - a lot of Star Wars Legends games, ranging from Star Wars: TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance; the Dark Forces Saga (basically, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II+Mysteries of the Sith, Jedi Outcast, and Jedi Academy); Episode I: Racer; Battlefront 2004 and II 2005; Republic Commando; and Empire at War+Forces of Corruption (with mods like Thrawn's Revenge to spice things up) - FreeSpace 2 (with mods like FS Port+Silent Threat: Reborn, Derelict, and Blue Planet) - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (with the Basic Unofficial Patch) - Homeworld 1 (Classic or Remastered with the Players Patch, I don't care) and Cataclysm/Emergence; might have to try out Deserts of Kharak again - Battlezone '98+The Red Odyssey Redux and II: Combat Commander - Splinter Cell 1 (I recommend the GOG release for the DLC missions, plus some fanpatches so to restore lighting and stuff) and Chaos Theory; Pandora Tomorrow is woefully absent due to it being abandonware - Project Wingman - Psychonauts 1 and 2; haven't played the VR-exclusive In the Rhombus of Ruin yet - The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (with the Ultimate Talkie Patch), Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Special Edition, The Curse of Monkey Island, and the recent Return to Monkey Island - Fable+The Lost Chapters
Btw great thanks for subtitling stuff really well so people with audial limitations can get the vibe of this great content. Learned how welcome but easily overlooked aspect that can be when working as software developer. You rock Mandalorian.
One of the main things I remember about the backlash to this game was RLM's horrendous Previously Recorded show, where they had some really bizarre takes about this game like claiming the AI wasn't actually dynamic, or that Metroidvania-style level design with backtracking to previous areas with new items to unlock doors was bad design (have any of those guys ever played another survival horror game?)
I adore Redlettermedia, but was the first and only time I watched a Pre-Rec video. They had only just started out IIRC, but it completely put me off for life. Absolutely one of the worst takes I've ever seen.
2:57 Love Anthony Howell’s VA work. He voiced Morgott in Elden Ring and Fourchenault in Final Fantasy XIV. Always a pleasant surprise to hear him pop up in a game.
I've loved the idea of Alien Isolation for so long (way too scared to ever play it) and I'm really happy that you also had background information about the game that I'd never heard of. Knowing that they had access to concept art, the actual sound banks, and probably more, is very cool. Also: HOW THE FUCK DID CREATIVE ASSEMBLY MAKE THIS GAME The pipeline of Total War strategy to Alien survival horror is insane.
Seriously! My friends and I got it on sale some weeks ago, and we've been binging it ever since. It's got that perfect mix of good gameplay, engaging character customisation, and fun/mockable story :D
ปีที่แล้ว +7
Didn't knew your channel. Love how in depth you go on these reviews, really interesting. I really like the slow pace and how you take your time to explain things and how you keep putting footage of what you're talking about with no commentary on top to hear things how they are.
That's probably for the best, working in a hospital myself I wouldn't be excited about the tidal wave of heart attack patients from people who played the VR version of that game.
@@CollinMcLean Yeah, I remember the famous tidal wave of heart attack patients when Resident Evil 7 came out on PSVR. It was brutal. But seriously, if VR horror games would actually cause heart attacks, there would already by a media frenzy and moral panic about it. Luckily, they don't.
I remember my one big "oh that's disappointing" moment with the alien came when I was in an area with two distinct sides. And I realized no matter how stealthy I was, how slow I moved, when I went from one side of the area to another, the alien would immediately jump into a vent and come out into the one I was in. Even if it hadn't spotted me at all it knew which side I was on and would go there just to make sure I was always having to sneak. Amazing game but that one moment has always bugged me.
And playing it with the VR mod it's a whole new experience. Seeing it all if you really are there AND with the DLCs you can be on the Nostromo. Just amazing in VR.
Can be played from start to finish. But it's gamepad or m/k only. Or motion controllers as emulated gamepad. Sadly he never finished the mod to fully support motion controllers. Nevertheless it's an amazing experience. And a VR headset is worth it for all the vr mods out there. If you want a glimps you can check my channel but it's in german.
@@DetectiveOlivaw Stable but incompatible with alias isolation. Those jaggies he mentioned become really apparent in VR but fortunately with the game being so dark it is only really noticeable with light surface borders in a black background. The creator of the VR mod said he was okay to let out the source code of his mod if he cant be bothered to develop it further but never did with the claim that it is full of spaghetti code that needs cleaning up. I guess he is too embarrassed for other programmers to see the various commented scrapped sections and janky obscure workarounds that just work. A pity really, we could have alias isolation and motion controls modded into mother VR by now.
A game I adored as a kid (mainly because I had no other games and it came with map editor and multiplayer) was Time Splitter 2. Would love to see a video on that. I remember watching a playthrough of Alien Isolation when it came out, and I still think a lot about it. Such a tremendously atmospheric and beautiful game
Don't feel bad, it is REALLY long. It took me over a year to finish this game, and I had to reinstall it twice because I kept stopping and uninstalling the game to make more space on my hard drive. Eventually I would reinstall the game and come back to it, only to play for another 10 hours and get bored. Think it took like 30-40 hours for me to finish it? So about 10-12 hours every installation lol
8 years later and this still remains to be one of my favourite games of all time. This might be the only horror game I have finished on several occasions, and each time I'm still surprised by the way this makes me feel. Incredible
Seriously, I don't know what engine this game was developed on but its an absolute technical marvel. When it first launched I played it on my dads 2008 Macbook Pro and was able to run it on high settings locked 30FPS.
I remember watching a Let's Play of this game around the time it released, and I remember also thinking "jesus man this game just keeps going" as I kept finding more and more episodes of the playthrough.
That effect at 4:30 is legit right? Would the MandaloreGaming I know and love go through all the effort of getting a section of his video review onto a vhs tape so he can record it for the sake of a ten second bit? Yes... yes he would.
I've always wanted an Alien game similar to Among Us, where you play together as 6 crew members trying to escape the ship from the alien. One player is an android in disguise which job is to sabotage and prevent the crew from escaping the ship.
The board game Nemesis does that to a terrific degree. Its sequel got a steam release recently and although its set on a Martian base, it has the exact same premise and it is a brutal experience each time
This video was incredibly well made and I absolutely loved the subtitles! They really did add a lot more to the video that I am very thankful I left on. I like to have subtitles on when they aren't generated. I love seeing what people do with them!
I always wonder if the fact that Creative Assembly has such a ... nonstandard expertise ... for making games like this contributed to all those crazy optimization hacks. Or even affected why they were so committed to the smallest details.
I don’t understand why people complain about this game being 20-30 hours long. My first play through I beat it in like 10-11 hours and speed/challenge runners can beat it in 3-6 hours.
This is by far the most "to the point" and professional game review EVER. So thank so much for this, and for sharing this passion with us!! This game was absolutely incredible... I'd pay hundreds of dollars to see some sort of remake (with improved graphics and improved AI, to make it even creepier and scarier). By the way, it's kind of funny, but this game at the time (and many years after I had played it) gave me some of the most timeless horrifying nightmares I've ever dreamt in my entire life. I had about 6 hyper-realistic, absolutely nerve-racking nightmares with the Alien as portrayed in Alien Isolation, that I will never ever forget... So yeah, this game was, and still is good to put it lightly..
This game is a damn gem. From the plot, environment, sound, level design, visuals and gameplay, It was just a blast. Such a damn good horror game done right. Would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Horror/Aliens Movie or Lore.
I like this game a lot. I played it on a surround sound system and it rocks. I also love the mechanic of being able to peak over objects. You can do it slow or fast. And you can have the option to peek just a little, or a lot. I really like the depth of field trick you can do when holding the movement sensor. If you press a button it goes blurry while the background comes more into focus. Brilliant little detail.
I was definitely one of those people caught up with the weird alien AI early on. First attempt at a playthrough on Hard had me getting pretty far, but after a long break and wanting to try it again but on normal so I could fuck up with the working joes more instead of perfect stealthing it I ran into way more issues with the Alien. so much so that I never got out of the first real section with it. That first big circular room after the introduction of it and I couldn't leave one of the rooms with a locker in it. It would walk away, I would wait for it to not even show up on the outer-edges of the motion tracker, and then it would immediately start wandering back in as soon as I tried to leave. Ironically, the event that made me go fuck it and switch back from hard to normal was the alien being too good at finding me. Crawling in a closed off vent that runs under the floor of a room when the alien stands in the location directly on top of me, so it considered me found instantly and made a minute long sprint to the entrance of that vent at the other end of the OTHER room, and scrambled through the vent to come directly to me with literally nothing to do to stop it.
My everlasting memory of this game was when i got the flamethrower for the first time and I burnt the alien and it ran away and hopped in a vent then it... left me alone for a good 5 minutes. I was making noise, enjoying myself... Alien came back and I burnt it again and it ran away. I thought the game was basically over and the flamethrower nullified the alien so I was sprinting about testing the flamer on the androids (It's not good on them at all) when the alien showed up so I sighed and burnt it and it... didn't run away. It stood there, and stared at me. And then it started to walk forwards very, very slowly. I put the flamer down and it dropped to all fours and started to sprint, when I pulled the flamer out it stopped and started to walk slowly around me. I realised it was learning how to get past the fire and to me. I don't remember if I survived that encounter, but that one part has always stuck with me as a holy fuck moment in gaming.
24:06 - I'm now imagining Mando using a girger wrench design tool, waving it to the skies and making it rain facehuggers and alien egg, while screaming XX121
This is a very good review by my book, also for first time players to know that an FPS limit is needed and that "Hard" is actually the recommended difficulty, which I agree with seeing how enemies can be unrealistically bad sighted on lower difficulties which eats into the immersion. The downside is that the Xenomorph will also be very clingy if you don't distract it.
Amateur ex A:I speedrunner here, the FPS can be capped at 275 without losing stability. Recommend doing this from nvidia control panel or amd's equivalent.
@@TealJosh Stable yes, but you lose audio during death animations very frequently unfortunately. For the full experience you need to be down in the double digits, e.g. 60 fps. (I'm also active speedrunner of low%, but under the account Streuwinkel. 👋🏼)
@@mleise8292 I used to do nmg and all missions no cc. I don't have anything on the leaderboards. I didn't get the no audio death animation too often, but at this level, even slight differences in hardware cause major differences in experience.
One thing that always struck me about seeing people play the game was how good the environments looked. I always thought it was just streamers having insane high spec PCs, glad to hear they just did a fantastic job at optimizing and it looks that good for everyone. I refuse to play the game myself because I’m a scared little bitch, but damn the art team really went all out and I respect the hell out of their work. Edit: oh this was made by Creative Assembly? That makes a lot of sense. From playing all of the Total War: Warhammer games I’ve learned that those dudes are insanely dedicated to making everything look good even when you might not see it because you’re zoomed the hell out during a battle.
Usually we want a game, that is based on a movie to be good, but here its almost the opposite. A Game that takes the best of the movies and performed even better. This Game is still ahead of its time. Now i need to play it again.
Really like the focus here on the worldbuilding, it's a real strength. In 2019 there was a whole "hey remember Alien Isolation?" thing going on that I don't think has come to much. Amanda Ripley was in several comics. I saw a webseries using game assets and some new animation (and oh boy the faces look if anything even worse!) and a novelization, which I read! It was half about Amanda's awful upbringing and difficult life in the shitty future and how she kept getting scammed trying to get information about her mother, and half sneaking through Sevastapool. Really has her escalate in callousness too. She starts off being horrified at bodies and telling a corpse "Rest in peace" as she reluctantly takes the wrench, and a few chapters later she's unleashing a Joe to strangle someone so she can steal his candy bar and dropping the wrapper on top of the corpse saying "Thanks for the food". The novelization was really pushing to tie in to the comics - the one person Amanda really cares about and feels like she "has" is a wounded marine named Zula who she works with there - but I don't think there was any crosstalk between it and the webseries, they end with Amanda coming to two mutually exclusive conclusions about Ellen Ripley.
Might actually have to check out the novelization. Perhaps a glimpse into where they could have went with further characterization of Amanda (cause she's pretty flat in the game)
I personally found the tram rides to be more comforting. Like, I know they were there to mask the loading screen, but everytime I entered them, I felt comfort in knowing that I was free of the alien's clutches, if only for a while.
IMO this game is the greatest movie adaptation game of all time. The world building and detail is second to none, you actually feel like Ripley in the first Alien at all times. Also 8 years later, how many games have even matched the lighting or been better? Incredible stuff.
17:17 I've watched this several times (because I rewatch Mandalore's vids when I'm bored I guess). Yes there's the Marv scream, but only now did I also notice the guy popping up in the lower left corner
Alien Isolation on GOG - gog.la/alien2
Alias Isolation - github.com/aliasIsolation/aliasIsolation/releases
It's a dark and smokey game which TH-cam compression does no favors for, but it eternally looks recent to me.
Looks decent? Or recent? Looking forward to the vid btw
are you the misterious druid knight?
Are you using graphic mods?
This is a great game, I'm not good with horror, so i could never play it (tried it a few times, never got past the motion detector part), i'm glad some people appreciate the game.
The courage cat theme is greatly appreciated at 25:00
I'm an Australian Electrician. And this game really nails the feel of working in someone's roof after finding a 7ft long snake skin.
Reminds me of the motorcyclist that found a spider in his helmet. On the freeway. At 85mph.
@@pob_42 good God thats terrifying.
Hey now, as an Aussie it’s not the 7ft carpet pythons that you need to worry about haha. It’s the way smaller eastern browns that give me the willies ;)
The idea of living in a place with venomous car-door dwelling spiders scare me
What does it mean if the snake skin is still hissing at me?
To this day it’s crazy to me that it took Creative Assembly, a strategy game developer, to make one of the best alien games.
it must have been the learned habits of creating AI in war/civilization games applied to the Alien genre, its interesting, makes me wonder what would happen if we had more video game developers jump around genres
Angry Joe lol
@@LouieCartoon strategy games require a lot more effort AI wise for unit pathing and reaction so yeah, that’s probably a good skill that translates well to other genres like horror.
@@GrippeeTV and the unit pathing in shogun 2 still fucks up on my end lmao
Its also one of the best horror games ever.
I always found the Working Joes were scarier than anything else in the game. With the alien you know you can't kill it and need to hide. But a blank faced robot briskly walking at your proclaiming it's intentions to help you is horrifying
Fecking YES. The intro where we're in the vent and watch it killing a survivor while claiming the guy should calm down and to let it help him was, in my opinion, downright perfect.
Yeah, the very first time I ever saw the working joe murder that guy in the start of the game, I thought they were horrifying.
"You are being hysterical" as he bashes his head against a wall. The game does an amazing job of displaying human emotion, panic, fear vs. the cold indifference of the xeno and androids.
i had a working joe chase me down a hallway to an elevator, the doors closed and just before the elevator began to movie it just…. clipped through the doors anyway and beat me to death. never went from terrified to just 😑 “oh okay” so fast
the robots are the least scary thing, they are a joke, kids
At one point, I set a Working Joe on fire with the flamethrower. Its response was to simply walk through the flames, sneer “Only animals fear fire” and then slowly strangle me to death. That whole scene made my blood run cold.
I got to learn first-hand that the Alien can get you in the early levels when I accidentally bumped the "swing wrench" button just after getting into that tram you have to wait a long time for. I hit the wall, making noise, and the Alien nearly immediately dropped from a nearby vent and bum rushed me before I could react in time to send the tram off. I didn't just shit a chicken, I shit the whole roost.
Impressive
@@Jtoob-z5n Sometimes I surprise even myself.
Dude same
Absolutely my experience too.
I had the same experience, I thought the game was entirely scripted so I was screwing around waiting for that tram to show up. Yeah…..next thing I knew it the alien was right on top of me and scared the crap out of me! I always hide behind those crates near the tram now, learned my lesson haha.
Marlow's encounter with the space-jockey was also key to resolving a plot-hole in the original film series. The crew of the Nostromo visited LV-426 because a signal was detected. Decades later, LV-426 was colonized without finding the derelict until it was too late. So between the two events, the signal was deactivated. Marlow turned it off.
Ooooh, that's interesting. In the world of Alien, always leave it to humans to fuck everything up beyond all comprehension.
So, is this game canon?
@@kaizokuAUTO always has been, sadly even colonial marines is also canon according to Ridley Scott
Quick! To alienpedia!
@Josias Lourenço REAL
The reason the music syncs so perfectly is because it uses Wwise. Wwise can essentially link specific events in the game to specific parts of music or tracks and dynamically switch between them immediately. Some of the Total War games also use Wwise and it's why the music there so perfectly flows between ambient idle in battle, to more tense build-up during the first charge into the enemy army, into full on battle music after contact is made. All of that is done entirely unscripted obviously and the sound engine itself handles all of it based on what's actually happening in the game. So, the music changing from scary horror running away music to something more intense and action-like when you turn around to fight the alien is because the sound engine picked up your actions and is suiting it.
I'm sure other audio engines also use this capability in a similar way, but I've personally modded with Wwise and it was really impressive how easy it was to use and how effective it is too.
I don't think that's exactly it, I think Mandalore was instead attributing coincidental timing to witchcraft (unless Wwise can predict player actions ahead of him)
Do know any tutorials for Wwise? I always wanted to give the Romans Latin voice lines in Total War Rome and Attila
I have seen the word Wwise often when starting a game. This is the first time I had a clue what it is. Thank you.
During my first playthrough, I spent most of the game thinking that the alien couldn't enter the vents and I was safe there. Seeing him suddenly crawling towards me in a vent about 12 hours into the game is probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me in my life.
For me, it was when Outlast's main antagonist, Chris Cheesegraterface, who had opened the locker next to where I was hiding and then left every single time I encountered him, decided to open TWO lockers around the middle of the game (which, of course, was the one I was in). When a game manages to make you think you know how the enemy works, only for it to break through your misconceptions like that is a good game indeed.
I kind of learned the opposite attitude: If it was in the vents, I was safe so long as I shut the fuck up and didn't make noise.
Haven't you ever seen an Alien movie? The vents belong to the xenomorphs!
you literally see him enter and exit via the vent system, tho. When you're crawling around trying to get from point-A to point- B and not a single person or android is around, that little blip on your tracker moving around is him in the vents.
@@batalorian7997 lol I was thinking the same thing
It felt like a love-letter to the original film which is all most people are asking for out of a movie-game.
Seriously. Feels like a better sequel to the original movie than the actual sequels themselves.
Couldn't have said it better myself. This passion project is the polar opposite of mass-market movie games.
@@Daniel-Munoz Aliens is one of my favorite movies. But you are correct this game is a much better sequel to the first movie.
@@Daniel-Munoz Hey now, Aliens was just as good as Alien and in a lot of ways I consider it a stronger film.
But... yeah everything from 3 onward was just bad... Prometheus was good but it's more of a loose spinoff movie than anything else...
@Bread And Circuses Just thought it sounded cool lol didn't know it had religious significance until years after picking it
I remember being absolutely blown away by the design in this game. The UI felt so diagetic and well put together and really remains a shining example of how set design and UIs should be done.
I had to look up the word “diagetic” and I still don’t understand what it means in the context you’ve used it.
Is the word “diegetic”? Even if so, I still don’t get it lol.
I loved The Empty Man. We need more horror movies where the characters take one look at spooky shenanigans going on and say “Screw this, I’m out.”
One of the new(ish) Halloween movies and a recent movie called Barbarian have two moments where characters do exactly that, they're worth a watch.
I hope we get more horror movies in general that go that far off the rails.
@@MandaloreGaming I was so tripped out at the very end, it's quickly become one of my favorites.
I recommend soviet 1967 Viy, it was an adaptation of 1835 book by Nikolai Gogol, and mc is literally forced to be there.
That one scene from Event Horizon. "We're leaving."
I had no idea it was this studio's first run at a first person game. They really knocked it out of the park in a way I didn't think was possible. This will eternally be my favorite survival horror game and I am heart broken that we will likely never see a proper sequel.
It reminds me about how fallen order from respawn was their first attempt at a third person non shooter game, it has some jank but its a damn solid piece of work overall for a first attempt at a new style.
It has a sequel or two: it's just the fact that they're movies named Aliens and Alien 3: Assembly Cut.
There are some comics that lead on after the game events if that's your kinda thing too
Originally it wasn't even a first person game, it was 3rd person over the shoulder because that was all the rage at the time. At one point they put together a test area with the camera moved into first person and they really liked it, but they had to fight with Sega a bit to convince them to let them shift the game entirely first person.
I have a personal pipe dream that one day they'd use this tech for a remake of Metroid Fusion. Y'know, an AI-driven SA-X.
Isolation already had a pretty solid Switch port, too.
I absolutely love this game to death but, I can't agree enough on how stretched out it felt
The entire latter half of the game was just me going, "Is this it? is it finally over..?"
Only for it to be like, "Nah, bro, you thought Ellen had a rough time? We're not even CLOSE to done."
in a way, it kinda made me love the game even more. It really makes you FEEL like the whole universe wants you dead.
The writer is Dan Abnett, he is mostly known for his novels set in the Warhammer 40k Sci fi setting. Which is all about a universe where everyone and everything is out to get you.
I think he was a excellent choice for a game like this
@@darkbozo11 I loved Alien Isolation and played it maybe six times. It could have been twice as long, and I've have still been fully engaged. Just love exploring Sevastopol station.
@@blakefrei3015 Sevastopol* After six playthroughs you'd think you could spell it right :P
it got too much for me when Amanda got kidnapped on her way to align the radio towers
I personally wish they would’ve made the game longer.
Like Mandalore says, there's plenty of things the devs just barely missed the mark with, but what you get in game has a level of polish I'd love to see in the majority of games coming out now. It's a triumph of horror gaming and I hope future development teams look at this game for how to make interactive systems of conflict integrate with an immersive experience.
Reminds me of Terminator: Resistance, this.
Oh, yes, it's good. Would even say it respected the first two films more than even its film contemporary Dark Fate.
I am just amazed the developer of this game made it, considering they are more of a one shot pony dealing with only total war.
Meanwhile 2042 and Pokemon today
@@warlockd Company names generally mean nothing, it's like animation, what matters is who's working at the company when a game is being made.
Mandalore causally flexing his VHS style editing abilities. That was honestly one of the best, most authentic VFX edits I've seen. I legit felt like I was watching an old VHS.
At 35:43 he has a brief credit saying that Noodle has a setup for the VHS stuff. So he had him actually put a clip onto a VHS tape and record it, rather than just trying to emulate it with editing.
@@IsraelStorey oh nice! Shout out to Noodle then, that was so clean!
Marble Hornets-level
I still cannot believe this game is 8 years old... It looks so good and was so good mechanically/story wise it's hard for me to realize
I can't cope with how time is flying as I age. I got into an argument last night with my best friend about whether or not Dragon Age 4 was taking too long to come out. I pointed out that it had only been a couple of years since the last game, Inquisition, had come out, and he looked at me like I'm an idiot and reminded me that it came out in 2014. I couldn't believe that it had been that long.
Seriously. I thought it was pretty funny when Mandy said his computer at the time couldn't run it at highest settings... and I'm still using my same computer from that time. :D
@@ArcaneAzmadi Let me guess, you are late 20s or early 30s?
@@ngastakvakis4425 Older.
@@ArcaneAzmadi it gets faster... the more your recent past becomes smaller compared ratio wise to your distant past the faster each year begins to feel... for a 5 year old a single year is a 5th of their life, for an 80 year old a year is just a small 80th... as a 44 year old myself, a year now feels like what a few months used to feel like for me in my 20's and compared to how a year felt for me in my pre teens... its like times on a god damn 3x fast forward, Months feel like weeks, weeks like days...
Kinda depressing... not to mention your mind starts to ignore remembering larger and larger chunks of experience in long term memory so large parts of a year simply get lost, unlike when decades younger.
A Sseth and Mandalore video in one day. What a gift.
Mandy managed to work on two videos at the same time while constantly switching from off the pills to on the pills and delivered them both on the same day - simply amazing.
Damn I came to say the same
mandalore = on ritalin
seth = no ritalin
max0r = severe ritalin withdrawl on caffeine
almost makes you think...
Also with a confirmation that Mandalore is also Polish like Sseth :)
Without a doubt the most terrifying horror game I have ever played. The atmosphere, the alien itself, the 1980s sci-fi theme, everything is amazing.
I always love to talk about the A.I. The Alien uses something called a "Director", which is essentially two AI's working together. One is the A.I. of the Alien itself, and the other is a sort've invisible man guiding and monitoring the player and the Alien, if the stress/activity seems low, it'll up send the Alien to where the player is or make him fall back if he's been near the player too much. It's a brilliant system and is also used by Left 4 Dead 2. All encounters are always different and random which is perfect for a horror game.
plus the director actually tracks how you've been dealing with the alien and will unlock certain abilities for the alien to directly counter your favorite tools
Left 4 Dead is criminally underrated for its AI. This whole Director idea is really solid and something only old Valve could come up with. It's a shame there's only Alien: Isolation that actually iterated on it and used it, at least I can't really think of anything else.
This is probably one of my favorite horror games of all time and seeing this video was a delight. One thing I remember my sibling said about it was that while, "yes the xenomorph is afraid of fire, you can very quickly help it overcome that fear"
This. Mine too. Resident Evil 7 is a close second. Alien Isolation was truly great.
Your sibling was a badass 😅
I just want to talk about my favorite part of this game.
Towards the end of the game you're used to seeing paranoid human survivors who shoot at everything in sight. It's a station full of conflict.
But then you get to a small room with a couch and a viewport with view of the planet. There's just one lone human survivor just sitting on the couch and staring out the window. He knows he's going to die and is choosing to accept his death in peace.
It was a woman
Late to the party but. That woman can be killed. She has a single bullet with her so she was planning on killing herself
One thing I always thought about with the computers and controls used in the world of Alien - in space the more simplified approach would actually make sense. Complex electronics could be more easily damaged by electro magnetic fields. So in some strange way that actually seemed more realistic to me than the hyper complex control systems I've seen in other science fiction. I do realize they were using 70s tech for the movies so that wasn't their reasoning - but it didn't feel to me like the tech was outdated if you get what I mean.
The ISS runs on fucking IBM ThinkPads. You are absolutely correct.
I've heard also that miniaturization is really costly process, so maybe solution for them is to throw all those cheap resources from space minning into big sturdy cheap computers.
@@wsp233 imagine playing alien isolation in space with a computer room the size of a gym
Another thing is that in space it's really hard to get rid of heat, as there's no atmosphere to absorb the heat, it has to radiate the heat like the Sun. So using shitty, low power, low heat computers would be ideal as opposed to, say, a 3080 setting the ship or station on fire or eats up all the electricity that's being generated. Sure they might take up a lot of space, but well, you're in space, there's so much room to build a big o'l computer. Not to mention it's probably cheaper to build a factory producing these weaker computers than getting all the tech and expertise to build a stronger computer. Also no gravity means less stress on components means you can cheap out on things like durability and general toughness.
@@daddysempaichan Holy shit the future really is huge. I can't wait to ding one millionth of a gpu and rest assured that I lost barely any performance
I liked Axel as an intro because when he's killed off, it makes the "isolation" feel all the more present
When I was a game dev student, I suggested we do our group project about Alien Isolation. 5 grown adults were put through the ringer... I was the only one that finished the game before we presented our "feature presentation" on it.
This game is a jewel of game design and master class in tension/horror building
I can usually handle scary games, but this one got my glutes so tense my ass is now 7 meters wide
@@wicked5999 Somehow this is very accurate while being hilarious. I have no fear in horror games, i rarely get startled, most of these games feel very poorly designed to me, lack real tension, the outlast series really didnt make me feel anything... Yet, isolation was so stressfull until you got some means of pushing the xeno away i kept telling myself "why is my butt clenched, and why has it been THAT clenched for 30 minutes ? Is this why i play games ? To muscle my ass and feel terrible while just watching a flat window into the void ?
Had to do small sessions for the first time in my life to keep my ass and my mind from solemn soreness.
@@sirzebra it's all about tension in scary games after all
I actually died to the alien at the first possible opportunity before the tram when I played the game for the first time. When your NPC friend got snatched by it I thought it had been alerted and I needed to run away, but running makes noise that can quickly attract it. I may have actually died a few times before I realized that your ally being eaten didn't actually mean you were in immediate danger and proceeded down to the tram quietly.
I didn't realize that was possible.
The exact same thing happened to me lol
Weird. I ran away in that part, and the noise didn't attract the Alien.
I had to pause to get up to get more rum and I noticed that you blurred her feet at 1:30 and that was a level of amusing I wasn't ready for. You are an editing inspiration to us all.
Mandalore echoed a strong sentiment I had with the Alien being terrifying. Suddenly hearing it break out into a sprint with it's loud footsteps was how I first encountered the Alien in this game. It's one of the few times I've frozen in fear (legs like jelly) in a videogame before (maybe next to the doll house in Resident Evil Village). I love horror games so I laughed maniacally afterwards because I loved how strongly that moment got me. I live fully for horror games to constantly challenge my emotions and Isolation will be one of my favourite memories playing it.
25:22 *Thank you!* I swear, 95% of _all_ reviewers, letsplayers and general gaming content creators get this wrong _all the time_
It drove me almost crazy these past few years whenever it came up.
_"Make sure to literally have your Motion Sensor up AT ALL TIMES!"_ was one of the highlights
I played this game in VR with my valve Index on hard and it was simply the best gaming experience of my life. The medical station was epic
San Cristobal PTSD Facility.
Damn I might have to try that.
@@bushmonster1702 and you have to use the valve index or at least a headset with large fov to see your detector easily. This game in VR is just insane. The alien nest was so nightmarish
@@153ridzzzz I remember the medical facility is where I started closing my eye just before getting killed. It was just to much at some point. But what a trip. I finished the game entirely in VR. I strongly recommend
How many times did you shit yourself
I know why the alien keeps patrolling an area. It is because it is walking over oxygen canisters. Those things make noise so it thinks you are making noise. I seem to recall they can be shot to explode too but I try not to make noise which is why I noticed it. Certain rooms have a lot of canisters and if you sorta walk/bump into them and they start rolling, that's like a wrench hit in loudness.
enemies don't hear the sound of stuff geting knocked over.
Working Joe: “Ow! Why are you hitting me?”
Ripley: “Because it pleases me, you slimy gutter dwarf!”
in the reactor they introduce a new enemy type
...the sliding puzzle
I loved this game and really wish there had been a full blown sequel.
It deserved it. One of the best games in the last 20 years.
It deserves a sequel so hard, what a great game. Cant believe it honestly
It's a totally different type of game and if you go into it saying "this is going to be shit because it's on a phone" you're certainly going to agree with yourself and decide that it's shit, but there's a short (hour or two) phone game that acts as a mini pseudo-sequel. There's not much to it, but it's only a few bucks and it's the only phone game I didn't uninstall in disgust after about 5 minutes of playing. For what it is, it's very well-made IMO. It's called Alien Blackout or something and I played it on an Android phone like... dunno, 4 years ago.
4:00 Fun fact, the most popular VHS/CRT effect filter was also created by digitally recording a signal from a couple old tape players which were subjected to miscellaneous abuse (magnets, rubbing stuff onto the tape, fiddling with cables and so on). You just can't beat the REAL technical limitations when it comes to these things...
This is definitely one of the best horror games I've played imo. And we will most likely never see such a faithful recreation of the original movie in video game ever again.
the crazy part about this game is when you look at the logic they made for the aliens AI director. it's actually insane to look at. it really is probally one of the better alien games that captures the franchise well.
Yeah, I think Isolation has one of the best AI in games. It often feels like it's a real creature and not just an NPC, although it definitely also still has its shortcomings.
Me seeing it and doing UE5 stuff as a hobby: I wonder if you can bend the Black Board AI design that far lol, I guess you can but you would need to write A LOT of it by hand.
@@rafox66 Yeah overall I think the AI is incredible but sometimes how random it is just makes it kind of annoying.
You know I don't need it to walk back and forth in some set pattern like most stealth games but it's just a pain in the ass when the Xeno suddenly goes in a random direction and then you get ganked and have to replay a whole section for the third time, just because the AI randomly done something different.
On paper that's so damn cool but in practice it's a bit annoying at times.
there’s something about the visuals of games from 2014 to 2016 that have made them age a lot better than other periods. The artists of that time were doing something really well to the products they were making.
Star Wars Battlefront 2015, for all its flaws, still looks amazing, and I think it captures the look and feel of the original trilogy almost as well this game does for Alien.
Metal gear solid 5 still looks so gorgeous Holy moly I could watch the sun set in that game for hours if I could
Need for Speed 2015 comes to mind.
I really enjoyed the section where you describe how much detail was poured into the level design. Without having seen the movie I don't think I'd be able to *fully* appreciate it, but it definitely made me watch the rest of the review in full screen to get whatever detail TH-cam left intact.
I also really appreciated the part where you went over the limited facial animations and how it was probably an intentional and wise choice to pour that budget into other areas of the game, which is something I probably wouldn't have thought about.
Great review!
There's no retro-futuristic aesthetic quite like it. It's as if the 60s/70s Apollo program kept going, and didn't even consider stopping at the moon. Humans became an interstellar civilization on the backs of cassette tapes.
Was there not a setting in which the alien in the game could detect your real voice if you got too startled? Pretty awesome game honestly, even with the flaws. As a massive Alien/Aliens fan, this was a massive love letter.
That was for some reason only a feature on the kinect verison I believe.
@@TheSpoonyCroy it was for consoles. PS4 had it too
Only for the console versions sadly
I remember watching a video of a guy using that feature on stream then giggled because of chat. He was hiding under the table in front of the Alien when it happened.
@@camblongkaras782 The console versions had some cool features that sadly the PC version never got. The PS4 had controller lightbar sync with the motion sensor and was colored green. Sounds like the Kinect on Xbox had the leaning plus alien able to hear your voice.
This is the only horror game where grown ass me had actual nightmares of after playing it.
The tension is relentless. Never played another game quite like it.
But it takes a lot of time to build the tension sadly. That is it's flaw. The opening is way too slow
@@morkgin2459 I thought the same, and only after replaying it a 2nd time that I truly fell in love with it.
and then there this a VR version 😱
@@morkgin2459 To be fair, you can't really build tension that will leave you scared for days without taking your sweet time.
@@OzixiThrill Im not sure how time impacts anything
just wanna say, bc i’ve never seen anyone mention it. but your captions are really good, ik that’s a weird compliment but yours are rlly descriptive and helpful
27:10 - ok. hear me out. Alien: Groundhog Day. You spawn in, open the first door and are MERKED by a xenomorph, but you come back. Over and over and over again. There's a single tightrope series of choices you can make to get to the escape pod. Learn through repetition.
MOONCRASH!!!!!!!
12:39 i was chewing gum while watching this and this scare got me so hard i reflexively took a huge breath in, which actually caused my gum to shoot straight into the back of my throat and i almost choked on it.
6:26 Polish community approves of this joke
It concern me that it's anti-catholic meme. Is it true?
@@overlord165 A lot of Poles joke about it, it's an hour at which our Pope died
I absolutely love the ernesty at the start of these going over the technical issues and fix ups.
Like hey, you deserve to enjoy the game, heres some things that may get in your way. Its so nice to know in advance.
Have beaten it on Nightmare twice, absolute blast not gonna lie, the mod that removes the Xeno's "tether" also greatly improves the experience
I think there's a VR version available...this game is certainly one of my favourites.
I think Axel is a good addition to the story. People always feel more comfortable in company, and you are kind of lulled into a false sense of security before the decent alone. Great video as always 👌 *chef kiss*
Now that you mention it, good point.
Also worth noting that more casual players would likely not pick up all the notes and voice logs and may have less experience with the mechanics of survival-horror games, so having Axel give a quick run-through is useful insurance in that regard
That kind of thing is in almost every horror game actually. Giving you a secure spot or company for a short while before taking it away from you. The "hubs" in Amnesia TTD and Outlast for example. They make you feel safe for a short while, then you progress and it puts the pressure back on you, and you feel it heavier *because* you have been given that break. It's like that "putting a frog in boiling hot water vs putting a frog in warm water and slowly heating it up" thing. The game takes you out of the boiling water to give you a rest, and in the process breaks your developed resistance to fear. Then it throws you back in.
My favorite game ever. It's a damn shame it didn't get a sequel :(
I don't think it need it, tho. Put CA making another horror game would have been nice.
I know it’s not what you meant, but the mobile game Alien Blackout acts as a sequel to the story and is pretty cool. It’s just a completely different style of game
I'm happy it was a commercial disappointment.
I don't live in a world where a sequel exists and a bunch of low standard gamers, coping and acting like that it's a masterpiece.
Every cheap trick in the book to artificially extend play time is here
@@MellowFungus Sounds like you're the one coping at one of the best horror games of all time and downright the most atmospheric game ever made, period. Fact of the matter is it sold badly because most "gamers" are low attention span zoomers and millenials who need to be actively pandered to if you want to actually make money in this wretched pisspit of an industry. And the fact that Alien Isolation raised a fat middle finger to this new age trope by itself makes it ten times better.
Actually, I have news for you
I actually really liked that the story just wouldn't freaking end. Because it's like a nightmare that won't end, you know? You just want it to end, but it won't stop. The shame is that the horror element wears off. But I personally never really thought this game was strong in the horror sense. It was more of a tense game, if that makes sense, not scary. I wasn't scared so much as I was anxious. And I think the game did keep its tension to the end.
"You just want it to end, but it won't stop."
"It just won't STOP!"
*Bong*"We're under attack!"
"I know...."
I wanted the game to end because it was bad.
You sound like you are coping...
I think bad pacing is bad pacing. If a game doesn’t end when it should my reaction is usually just boredom or annoyance.
I got to the point that I was no longer scared by the alien... just frustrated/annoyed. After that the game lost its appeal. That was 8 years ago. Maybe I'll pick it up again some time. It was a good game, no question there.
@@MellowFungusThen why play it for that long if you felt that way?
Playing games for a good 35 of my 40 years. Have played thousands of games, have completed hundreds. And Isolation makes my top 10 favourite ever. Delighted to see this on my notifications.
Sir what other games would make it to your top 10?
@@badbadman9412 Deus Ex (original), Half Life 1, 2, and Episodes, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Final Fantasy VII (original), Mass Effect trilogy, Resident Evil 2 (original), Metal Gear Solid, Prey (2017), Knights of the Old Republic 1/2. Not exactly 10 as I've included some series where multiple games cover the same story. What about yours?
For my top 10s for the time being (my preferences change depending on, say, mood) and since Anthony mentioned some of them (so I won't mention them out of avoiding redundancy), here are these:
- a lot of Star Wars Legends games, ranging from Star Wars: TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance; the Dark Forces Saga (basically, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II+Mysteries of the Sith, Jedi Outcast, and Jedi Academy); Episode I: Racer; Battlefront 2004 and II 2005; Republic Commando; and Empire at War+Forces of Corruption (with mods like Thrawn's Revenge to spice things up)
- FreeSpace 2 (with mods like FS Port+Silent Threat: Reborn, Derelict, and Blue Planet)
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (with the Basic Unofficial Patch)
- Homeworld 1 (Classic or Remastered with the Players Patch, I don't care) and Cataclysm/Emergence; might have to try out Deserts of Kharak again
- Battlezone '98+The Red Odyssey Redux and II: Combat Commander
- Splinter Cell 1 (I recommend the GOG release for the DLC missions, plus some fanpatches so to restore lighting and stuff) and Chaos Theory; Pandora Tomorrow is woefully absent due to it being abandonware
- Project Wingman
- Psychonauts 1 and 2; haven't played the VR-exclusive In the Rhombus of Ruin yet
- The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (with the Ultimate Talkie Patch), Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Special Edition, The Curse of Monkey Island, and the recent Return to Monkey Island
- Fable+The Lost Chapters
@@michaelandreipalon359 Nice selection. Vampire the Masquarade is definitely in my top 20. Amazing game, with the patch of course.
@@anthonyhiggins9799 Appreciate those words.
Btw great thanks for subtitling stuff really well so people with audial limitations can get the vibe of this great content. Learned how welcome but easily overlooked aspect that can be when working as software developer. You rock Mandalorian.
One of the main things I remember about the backlash to this game was RLM's horrendous Previously Recorded show, where they had some really bizarre takes about this game like claiming the AI wasn't actually dynamic, or that Metroidvania-style level design with backtracking to previous areas with new items to unlock doors was bad design (have any of those guys ever played another survival horror game?)
I adore Redlettermedia, but was the first and only time I watched a Pre-Rec video. They had only just started out IIRC, but it completely put me off for life. Absolutely one of the worst takes I've ever seen.
@@three_seashells With Pre Rec ending years ago, I'm glad they figured out they should just stick to talking about movies instead.
2:57 Love Anthony Howell’s VA work. He voiced Morgott in Elden Ring and Fourchenault in Final Fantasy XIV. Always a pleasant surprise to hear him pop up in a game.
This is my favorite horror game ever, Im always happy to watch someone else "enjoying" it
-Edit 1-
11:48 That scared me XD
I legitimately reached out for an invisible flute, I can't imagine what would happen if it happened in game.
If graphics don't bother you much I highly recommend giving System Shock 2 a go
@@chillhour6155 I did, all those menus, stores, stats, etc. were quite confusing
I've loved the idea of Alien Isolation for so long (way too scared to ever play it) and I'm really happy that you also had background information about the game that I'd never heard of. Knowing that they had access to concept art, the actual sound banks, and probably more, is very cool.
Also: HOW THE FUCK DID CREATIVE ASSEMBLY MAKE THIS GAME
The pipeline of Total War strategy to Alien survival horror is insane.
Fireteam Elite is unironically one of my favorite games of the past two years. It's surprisingly satisfying and fun.
Seriously! My friends and I got it on sale some weeks ago, and we've been binging it ever since. It's got that perfect mix of good gameplay, engaging character customisation, and fun/mockable story :D
Didn't knew your channel. Love how in depth you go on these reviews, really interesting. I really like the slow pace and how you take your time to explain things and how you keep putting footage of what you're talking about with no commentary on top to hear things how they are.
Know*
The VR mod had huge potential but sadly it was abandoned.
Also, as a Pole - mad props for the 2137 joke :D
That's probably for the best, working in a hospital myself I wouldn't be excited about the tidal wave of heart attack patients from people who played the VR version of that game.
@@CollinMcLean Yeah, I remember the famous tidal wave of heart attack patients when Resident Evil 7 came out on PSVR. It was brutal.
But seriously, if VR horror games would actually cause heart attacks, there would already by a media frenzy and moral panic about it. Luckily, they don't.
Mandalore having PTSD-like flashbacks related to 2137 and Polish Pope memes made my day honestly.
I remember my one big "oh that's disappointing" moment with the alien came when I was in an area with two distinct sides. And I realized no matter how stealthy I was, how slow I moved, when I went from one side of the area to another, the alien would immediately jump into a vent and come out into the one I was in. Even if it hadn't spotted me at all it knew which side I was on and would go there just to make sure I was always having to sneak.
Amazing game but that one moment has always bugged me.
And playing it with the VR mod it's a whole new experience. Seeing it all if you really are there AND with the DLCs you can be on the Nostromo. Just amazing in VR.
Is the VR mod really stable? This is definitely one of the few games I’d seriously consider getting a headset for, as silly as that sounds
Can be played from start to finish. But it's gamepad or m/k only. Or motion controllers as emulated gamepad. Sadly he never finished the mod to fully support motion controllers. Nevertheless it's an amazing experience. And a VR headset is worth it for all the vr mods out there. If you want a glimps you can check my channel but it's in german.
@@DetectiveOlivaw Stable but incompatible with alias isolation. Those jaggies he mentioned become really apparent in VR but fortunately with the game being so dark it is only really noticeable with light surface borders in a black background. The creator of the VR mod said he was okay to let out the source code of his mod if he cant be bothered to develop it further but never did with the claim that it is full of spaghetti code that needs cleaning up. I guess he is too embarrassed for other programmers to see the various commented scrapped sections and janky obscure workarounds that just work. A pity really, we could have alias isolation and motion controls modded into mother VR by now.
A game I adored as a kid (mainly because I had no other games and it came with map editor and multiplayer) was Time Splitter 2. Would love to see a video on that.
I remember watching a playthrough of Alien Isolation when it came out, and I still think a lot about it. Such a tremendously atmospheric and beautiful game
Could never finish this game, was too stressful. But for me, it was a masterpiece.
Don't feel bad, it is REALLY long.
It took me over a year to finish this game, and I had to reinstall it twice because I kept stopping and uninstalling the game to make more space on my hard drive. Eventually I would reinstall the game and come back to it, only to play for another 10 hours and get bored. Think it took like 30-40 hours for me to finish it? So about 10-12 hours every installation lol
I really wanted the platinum trophy on ps4 but scared me too much
8 years later and this still remains to be one of my favourite games of all time. This might be the only horror game I have finished on several occasions, and each time I'm still surprised by the way this makes me feel. Incredible
I remember this being so impressive that when I played it on 360, I felt like I had a next gen console
Seriously, I don't know what engine this game was developed on but its an absolute technical marvel. When it first launched I played it on my dads 2008 Macbook Pro and was able to run it on high settings locked 30FPS.
I remember watching a Let's Play of this game around the time it released, and I remember also thinking "jesus man this game just keeps going" as I kept finding more and more episodes of the playthrough.
Yo I sniped this video from the home page!
I sniped the notification faster than they wrote out newt after aliens
Very impressive
Got a link to this vid from 2007 RuneScape
16:43 I did not expect to see carver
That effect at 4:30 is legit right?
Would the MandaloreGaming I know and love go through all the effort of getting a section of his video review onto a vhs tape so he can record it for the sake of a ten second bit? Yes... yes he would.
Glad to see you give EDF the respect it deserves as a seminal piece of gaming history.
To my surprise this game has a phone port
I've always wanted an Alien game similar to Among Us, where you play together as 6 crew members trying to escape the ship from the alien. One player is an android in disguise which job is to sabotage and prevent the crew from escaping the ship.
I was going to make fun of you for mentioning among us but that actually sounds like a cool idea for a game
@@sdsdfdu4437 Lmao same
There was a warcraft 3 custom map called parasite that was exactly this
The board game Nemesis does that to a terrific degree. Its sequel got a steam release recently and although its set on a Martian base, it has the exact same premise and it is a brutal experience each time
There is also Nemesis: Distress that leans more on the Alien Isolation game play, but it's still in EA and rough around the edges.
This video was incredibly well made and I absolutely loved the subtitles! They really did add a lot more to the video that I am very thankful I left on. I like to have subtitles on when they aren't generated. I love seeing what people do with them!
I always wonder if the fact that Creative Assembly has such a ... nonstandard expertise ... for making games like this contributed to all those crazy optimization hacks. Or even affected why they were so committed to the smallest details.
I don’t understand why people complain about this game being 20-30 hours long. My first play through I beat it in like 10-11 hours and speed/challenge runners can beat it in 3-6 hours.
Such a great game. It definitely deserves a sequel.
We already got Aliens and Alien³: Assembly Cut, though.
@Ching Vang What?
This is by far the most "to the point" and professional game review EVER. So thank so much for this, and for sharing this passion with us!! This game was absolutely incredible... I'd pay hundreds of dollars to see some sort of remake (with improved graphics and improved AI, to make it even creepier and scarier).
By the way, it's kind of funny, but this game at the time (and many years after I had played it) gave me some of the most timeless horrifying nightmares I've ever dreamt in my entire life. I had about 6 hyper-realistic, absolutely nerve-racking nightmares with the Alien as portrayed in Alien Isolation, that I will never ever forget... So yeah, this game was, and still is good to put it lightly..
This game is a damn gem. From the plot, environment, sound, level design, visuals and gameplay, It was just a blast. Such a damn good horror game done right. Would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Horror/Aliens Movie or Lore.
21:37 best part
I like this game a lot. I played it on a surround sound system and it rocks. I also love the mechanic of being able to peak over objects. You can do it slow or fast. And you can have the option to peek just a little, or a lot. I really like the depth of field trick you can do when holding the movement sensor. If you press a button it goes blurry while the background comes more into focus. Brilliant little detail.
I was definitely one of those people caught up with the weird alien AI early on. First attempt at a playthrough on Hard had me getting pretty far, but after a long break and wanting to try it again but on normal so I could fuck up with the working joes more instead of perfect stealthing it I ran into way more issues with the Alien. so much so that I never got out of the first real section with it. That first big circular room after the introduction of it and I couldn't leave one of the rooms with a locker in it. It would walk away, I would wait for it to not even show up on the outer-edges of the motion tracker, and then it would immediately start wandering back in as soon as I tried to leave.
Ironically, the event that made me go fuck it and switch back from hard to normal was the alien being too good at finding me. Crawling in a closed off vent that runs under the floor of a room when the alien stands in the location directly on top of me, so it considered me found instantly and made a minute long sprint to the entrance of that vent at the other end of the OTHER room, and scrambled through the vent to come directly to me with literally nothing to do to stop it.
I think they should've given Ripley a pulse rifle after the reactor sequence.
With a 200round clip and no further ammunition. That would have made the final segment a blast. Pun intended.
As an Aliens versus Predator game fan, I could feel the same, but the bad memories caused by Colonial Marines make me want to think twice.
My everlasting memory of this game was when i got the flamethrower for the first time and I burnt the alien and it ran away and hopped in a vent then it... left me alone for a good 5 minutes. I was making noise, enjoying myself... Alien came back and I burnt it again and it ran away.
I thought the game was basically over and the flamethrower nullified the alien so I was sprinting about testing the flamer on the androids (It's not good on them at all) when the alien showed up so I sighed and burnt it and it... didn't run away. It stood there, and stared at me.
And then it started to walk forwards very, very slowly. I put the flamer down and it dropped to all fours and started to sprint, when I pulled the flamer out it stopped and started to walk slowly around me. I realised it was learning how to get past the fire and to me.
I don't remember if I survived that encounter, but that one part has always stuck with me as a holy fuck moment in gaming.
Pacing might've been a little off for a few bits, but I freaking love this game and am so sad there hasn't been a second game yet
I can't believe it's been 8 years since this released. It really feels like it was 2 or 3 years ago.
24:06 - I'm now imagining Mando using a girger wrench design tool, waving it to the skies and making it rain facehuggers and alien egg, while screaming XX121
I laughed like an idiot at the censored feet (1:31)
This is a very good review by my book, also for first time players to know that an FPS limit is needed and that "Hard" is actually the recommended difficulty, which I agree with seeing how enemies can be unrealistically bad sighted on lower difficulties which eats into the immersion. The downside is that the Xenomorph will also be very clingy if you don't distract it.
Amateur ex A:I speedrunner here, the FPS can be capped at 275 without losing stability. Recommend doing this from nvidia control panel or amd's equivalent.
@@TealJosh Stable yes, but you lose audio during death animations very frequently unfortunately. For the full experience you need to be down in the double digits, e.g. 60 fps.
(I'm also active speedrunner of low%, but under the account Streuwinkel. 👋🏼)
@@mleise8292 I used to do nmg and all missions no cc. I don't have anything on the leaderboards. I didn't get the no audio death animation too often, but at this level, even slight differences in hardware cause major differences in experience.
First time watching i did not realized you actually placed a VHS recorded back play in there; you absolute mad lad.
One thing that always struck me about seeing people play the game was how good the environments looked. I always thought it was just streamers having insane high spec PCs, glad to hear they just did a fantastic job at optimizing and it looks that good for everyone.
I refuse to play the game myself because I’m a scared little bitch, but damn the art team really went all out and I respect the hell out of their work.
Edit: oh this was made by Creative Assembly? That makes a lot of sense. From playing all of the Total War: Warhammer games I’ve learned that those dudes are insanely dedicated to making everything look good even when you might not see it because you’re zoomed the hell out during a battle.
Usually we want a game, that is based on a movie to be good, but here its almost the opposite. A Game that takes the best of the movies and performed even better. This Game is still ahead of its time.
Now i need to play it again.
i was recently watching some alien isolation videos and this is a godsend. thank you so much for covering this.
1:46 "edging issues"
Highly recommend playing this in VR. It's an unforgettable experience.
Well done to everyone involved in making this masterpiece.
Really like the focus here on the worldbuilding, it's a real strength.
In 2019 there was a whole "hey remember Alien Isolation?" thing going on that I don't think has come to much. Amanda Ripley was in several comics. I saw a webseries using game assets and some new animation (and oh boy the faces look if anything even worse!) and a novelization, which I read! It was half about Amanda's awful upbringing and difficult life in the shitty future and how she kept getting scammed trying to get information about her mother, and half sneaking through Sevastapool. Really has her escalate in callousness too. She starts off being horrified at bodies and telling a corpse "Rest in peace" as she reluctantly takes the wrench, and a few chapters later she's unleashing a Joe to strangle someone so she can steal his candy bar and dropping the wrapper on top of the corpse saying "Thanks for the food".
The novelization was really pushing to tie in to the comics - the one person Amanda really cares about and feels like she "has" is a wounded marine named Zula who she works with there - but I don't think there was any crosstalk between it and the webseries, they end with Amanda coming to two mutually exclusive conclusions about Ellen Ripley.
Might actually have to check out the novelization. Perhaps a glimpse into where they could have went with further characterization of Amanda (cause she's pretty flat in the game)
I personally found the tram rides to be more comforting. Like, I know they were there to mask the loading screen, but everytime I entered them, I felt comfort in knowing that I was free of the alien's clutches, if only for a while.
IMO this game is the greatest movie adaptation game of all time. The world building and detail is second to none, you actually feel like Ripley in the first Alien at all times.
Also 8 years later, how many games have even matched the lighting or been better? Incredible stuff.
What the he’ll 12:37 scared the hell out of me and i’m just watching lmao. The sound in this game is too good..
Halloween for Thanksgiving! I love tasty leftovers!
Genuinely the scariest game I've played with the Alien Everywhere mod, this in VR would be incredible
there is a vr mod for this game
17:17 I've watched this several times (because I rewatch Mandalore's vids when I'm bored I guess). Yes there's the Marv scream, but only now did I also notice the guy popping up in the lower left corner