Alien: Isolation (Analysis of Games)

Misc notes taken while playing

• I definitely noticed a difference in architecture between the initial spaceship level and Sevastopol station. Fiji is dumb the advertisements on the walls are dumb. The model Sevastopol station that shows up at the beginning is dumb.
• When looking at the planet the clouds move way too fast.
• It uses tropes from other games like Half-Life and Wolfenstein, like having announcements over the air, or having the environment react to you in a convenient way, like when your ship passes you by and the shutters go down at the exact same time.
• Having a central AI like in Portal for the movie 2001.
• The overuse of events, having lights in the fence.
• Having the aliens screech every couple minutes at dramatic moments.
• I do really like the slow walking pace.
• The recordings are overacted.
• The cutscene with the English guy is stupidly overacted.
• Having guns on the space station is stupid.
• Having the batteries on the flashlight in short supply is such a cliche.
• The game forces you into danger, like when you have to deactivate this generator to distract humans.
• I really, really like this slow build-up to the alien.
• The minigames are kind of interesting, like adjusting the power.
• I like the tension of not knowing if you are safe or not.
• I think the big thing about the movie was that they didn't know what they should do next, they weren't sure what they were up against. So any game that wants to recreate that feeling from the movie needs to make the opponent unpredictable.
• The first segment where you have to face the Alien(? the auto-transcriptions says "women's") on your own is frustrating because you don't really know what you're supposed to do to get past it. It's trial and error, and time to when you get to that point(? Not sure what I was saying)
• In this game it becomes clear how important it is to be able to look around objects and look down and move around slowly from a crouching position to a standing position. The game is a little limited in that way.
• You definitely see the alien way too much for it to be a very close recreation of the original movie experience. The alien seems more like a traditional bad guy like in Outlast (another game). And he makes so much noise moving around that it doesn't fit with the movie's portrayal of the alien being silent. They should have found another way to build tension.
• The motion tracker has such a ridiculously short effective range that it's basically useless. As soon as you see that the alien is on the tracker you have only a few seconds to try to hide.
• On multiple occasions the alien has basically been right behind me when I jump into the locker but it pretends it didn't see where I went. It's really very ridiculous.
• It's also ridiculous that the alien was right there when I started on survival mode and then just kept patrolling like a typical bad guy.
• This game was way overhyped.
• I was reminded of Brett saying it is extremely important to watch other people play your game.
• I was also thinking it is extremely important to get an early build of the core game mechanics to make sure they work.