Tonight I Tried to Play Alien: Isolation.
Here is how it went:
Generally speaking, I’m not big on horror movies. I don’t scare easily. When I was young, horror movies seemed more sad than anything. These days I’m usually so distracted by the structure of the story that I just don’t get scared. But there are a few exceptions, because there are some ideas I find personally, fall-on-your-ass terrifying. And there are more than a few horror movies that present those fears in a serious, thematically dense, indelible way.
Alien is one of them. In university, I wrote an essay about the structure of Alien’s screenplay. I haven’t read it since, and it is probably embarrassing. What I do remember is that I made the interpretive leap that Alien is really, I mean when you get right down to it, really about capitalist society and how it keeps down the lower class, and yadda yadda. That’s certainly what the portrayal of its future world is like. But it’s not the film’s most basic level. Alien is scarier than that. Alien is about some very small things who are about to be crushed underfoot by a very large thing, and at the last moment manage to barely get out of the way.*
* I haven’t seen Prometheus, but I hear there’s a big action scene where they do this metaphor but it’s 100 percent literal instead.
So that’s the first thing to remember: I think Alien is actually scary.
What’s more: I’ve never thought a video game is scary. Resident Evil is goofy. The Last of Us was an occasionally tense experience, but the narrative structure was the most conspicuous part of that excellent game, and I was too busy admiring the storytelling to get viscerally scared. PT was clever and atmospheric, but got bogged down too quickly in point-and-click-adventure-style puzzles with too much trial and error. I’m always going to think anything featuring Slender Man is stupid, because it was created on the same message board that gave birth to Johnny Five-Aces.
Really, anything predating this console generation has always been a little too “Uncanny Valley” for me to take seriously. I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but for me, horror requires at least a certain level of visual fidelity and consistency. On the Xbox 360, interactive technology still hadn’t quite advanced enough to hit my (personal) breaking point here. Now the visuals and sound seem to have finally hit the point that they can not only clear that bar, but kick it right off the field. (I may not know how pole vaulting works.)
So then a game comes along like Alien: Isolation.
The last Alien game was a disaster on just about every level. It wasn’t any good for anybody. The press met Alien: Isolation with slightly more enthusiasm than they had Sega’s 2013 game — Colonial Marines being one of the four or five games per year the press will have the fortitude to call outright terrible — but it still received a vaguely indifferent response from people who have to beat video games within a deadline, and who play them in very brightly lit offices.**
** Speaking of the press, a tangent: Earlier tonight I listened to the Giant Bombcast, a jocular video game podcast I used to download every week. At its prime, the site combined thoughtful, principled pop game journalism with the easy hangout chemistry of a west coast improv show. Then the regular host, a lovable cherub who on the radio could feel like your best friend, died on his honeymoon vacation. The podcast was a good source of easy amusement for a long time, but it lost its escapist appeal — to me — when every episode began to remind me of a stranger’s death I’d found surprisingly painful.
But the site’s been doing better lately. They’ve added new personalities and returned Jeff Gerstmann’s schlubby wisecracking to the sidelines, where it kills. Patrick Klepek*** found a niche and filled it with enthusiasm. Most surprisingly, Brad Shoemaker — the one whose ineptitude at playing games is an inside joke among fans — was promoted to podcast host, where he proved himself to be surprisingly capable. This is sort of like a real-life version of that time he bashed his head against the wall of Modern Warfare’s hardest level for hours, and somehow managed to bust right through it at the exact moment Vinny Caravella played the theme song to Chariots of Fire.)
*** The day after I wrote this, Patrick Klepek announced that he was leaving Giant Bomb. If his replacement fits in with the team as well as Dan Ryckert did, the site could be entering a true renaissance.
A seemingly higher percentage of PC gamers and critics, though, are giving Alien: Isolation high acclaim. I feel like more buzz has built up for the game now than there was at its release. At this moment it’s hitting the perfect storm of Steam holiday sales, end-of-the-year top ten lists, and a dark, cold winter. Buzz for Alien: Isolation went up after its release, and that’s such a refreshing thing to hear about a game in the year of Destiny, AC: Unity, The Crew, Halo: MCC, Watch_Dogs, etc. (The same post-release acclaim has gone to Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, which: getting two excellent movie tie-in games in one year is so unheard-of I can’t even think of a metaphor for it. We used to say things like, “Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man and Mega Man in the same game together? Uh, yeah, sure. When two excellent movie tie-in games come out in one year!” In 2014, both of those things actually happened.)****
**** I wrote this part and then, the very next day, my friend Grant was picking up digital souvenirs in Far Cry 4 when he witnessed an eagle pick up a pig and attempt to carry it away in its talons. That’s right, he literally saw a pig fly. When he told me the story, we laughed like we were kids again. “That would be a viral video if it happened in real life,” I said. “Can you open your cellphone in the game and film things that happen, and upload them to an in-game YouTube?” I was only half-joking; the video can be seen on the real-life YouTube here.
Playing Grand Theft Auto: Online with Grant a few weeks earlier, I’d realized with alarm that I’d bought a low-rent apartment that eerily matched my actual, real-life apartment. Neither of them get much light. Grant and I spend our time in GTA:O like we did in high school, when we were growing up together in a small town: he drives somewhere — the destination doesn’t really matter — and we talk. Sometimes his girlfriend is there too, even when she doesn’t want to be, like when Grant’s microphone picks up her voice as she gets home from work.
He asked if I thought the GTA:O server we occupied had recorded our names somewhere, as part of some shared history, and I wondered whether games would one day allow for our virtual lives to pass down in the memories of generations of players, perhaps for many years — or forever. Later, after he went offline and I found myself alone, I drove across the sands of San Andreas Beach at sunset, jumped a dune and crashed my vehicle into the sea.
I’m avoiding talking about Alien: Isolation. Here’s why.
I turned on my PS4 and it was already there, waiting for me. I’d bought it earlier in the day on my phone, forget that I’d set the download going at the time. So it greeted me at the home screen, placid as an uncracked egg.
Upon launching the game, the very first thing I saw was this dialog box:
“There is not enough space in System Storage to record your gameplay.”
I’m paraphrasing because I (obviously) wasn’t able to get a screenshot. Alien: Isolation had snuck aboard. It was hiding in System Storage. And the PS4 had turned off the security cameras, agreeable as an android.
The first thing you see when you boot Alien: Isolation is the 20th Century Fox logo — the one from Alien. The exact one. You’re sure of it, because it looks just like it did on the VHS copy you found at the pawn shop, watched and re-watched and baking on a metal rack in the sun. The developers know nostalgia.
And they know authenticity, too. With Creative Assembly’s own vanity card, the visuals and (especially) the sound exactly emulate the busted gas-station-cash-register technology of the Alien universe. It is a very convincing simulation.
The main menu, accompanied by music that either comes from the original film or is close enough to feel like it should have, is the perfect 21st-century equivalent of the long opening title sequence. Here is a very large thing: a celestial body, hanging in space. Here is a very small thing: the mining ship Nostromo in the film, the space station Sevastopol in the game. Some outpost of humanity. Here is a very big thing: the vastness of space. A planetary body, swirling with an angry storm, looking like the contours of that alien egg. A creature with teeth.
Since it’s a video game, in Alien: Isolation this opening image plays over prompts for changing extra “immersion” settings. The design of these menus is modern and clean, and fits perfectly with the austere ‘80s aesthetic. They even sound like Tom Skerritt keying commands into the ship’s central computer. “Do you want the camera to track the movement of your head?” “Do you want the microphone to pick up the sounds in your room?” The game can hear you. The game can see you.
They don’t tell you the most interesting thing about this game: the Alien is unscripted. It doesn’t come out at prescripted times or deploy canned animations. It is an artificial intelligence in the same way that the Alien is in the world of the films. The developers simply turn it loose and lock the door on you, like the cowardly company man in Aliens. (Video games have coasted for years on the fact that they could reasonably approximate Aliens. Now they are getting very close to nailing Alien.)
Wearing my surround headphones the whole time, I looked away from the title screen for only a second, just as the ominous soundtrack reached a crescendo — and while my back was turned, the screen crackled with the sharp blue static of a broken-down Weyland-Yutani computer, and I yelped. Then I said, “piece of shit,” to the machine, like Dallas might say to MU-TH-ER, or like Kurt Russell does with a glass of scotch in The Thing.
So, tonight I played Nidhogg instead. In Nidhogg, you find yourself inside an Errol Flynn swordfighting movie. It is all old-school swashbuckling; constant setbacks and comebacks. The controls are perfect; if you want to do a cartwheel, you just… do a cartwheel. It looks like a Commodore 64 and feels like the end of the world. It is a lot of fun. It is a Video Game. In Nidhogg, you run from the left of the screen to the right, killing many times and dying many times, and when you fight to the end of the battlefield a stadium full of people cheers you with roaring applause, and at the exact moment that you feel accomplishment and relief, a demon flies across the sky and swallows you whole.
