Genre: Survival Horror
Developer: Creative Assembly
Publisher: Sega

Cold, tight metal corridors with strobing emergency lights, claustrophobic, the mechanical clop of your boots over the grated floor, with slats just big enough for something to reach through and grab you... the alien itself slithers and hisses, its large tail trailing behind it. The setting from Alien, reproduced masterfully, right down to the sleeping pods. And most impressive of all, many of the scenes in the game look, quite literally, photographic in quality.

Audio plays a massive and active role in Alien: Isolation's gameplay, as every single aural cue can help to determine the movement of the game's various baddies-- from the alien, to the malevolent androids, to the station's hostile human denizens. Music plays at just the right moments, leading to truly suspenseful situations.

Alien: Isolation plays a bit like indie hit "Amnesia: The Dark Descent", in that the entire game is played from the first person, and the thing that is trying to stalk you can not be killed-- merely distracted, and avoided. For a game with a focus entirely on stealth, it sometimes feels like the designers didn't include enough actual stealth mechanics; there is no "Metal Gear Solid" mini-map radar with vision cones, nor is there a "Splinter Cell"-esque concealment meter. At least the level design is excellent, providing a myriad of places to hide, and branching paths via which to confuse pursuers.

The world has seen better stealth games. The world has also seen better horror titles. And the world has also seen some excellent movie tie-in releases over the decades. What makes Alien: Isolation stand out is that it re-creates, with relentless faithfulness, the world of a classic film, and pairs that amazing aesthetic with solid game design principles. The game does feel a bit too guided, with story shuffling the player on a mostly linear track-- which makes it a shame that most of the purely gameplay-focused challenge mode content is locked behind paid DLC. But that's a molehill next to a mountain-- or at least next to a sizeable hill.