ALIEN: ISOLATION. In The Next Gen, No One Can Hear You Scream.

 

After the shocking disappointment that was last year's Gearbox/SEGA joint Aliens: Colonial Marines, it appears something big has been cooking up the whole time for a new generation of pure survival horror on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

David Houghton of GamesRadar has the hands on:

This is something you've never seen before. It's a brutal, intense, harrowing, densely crafted triple-A experience, going right back to the original 1979 source material to create something utterly true to Ridley Scott's Alien. And from what I've played and seen so far, it looks very, very, very good indeed. In fact the last time I previewed a licensed game that looked this faithful and this high of quality, it was Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Houghton stressed the pure survival horror nature of the game:

You are not going to be fighting Aliens in Alien: Isolation. You are going to be going up against one Alien at a time, in unscripted, unpredictable encounters in dark, oppressive, cramped conditions. And the only win to be had will be escape. Try to take on a Xenomorph, and you will die. Try to outrun a Xenomorph, and you will die. Be seen, heard, sensed or suspected while too close to a Xenomorph, and there’s a very high probability indeed that you will die. Within seconds. Almost without warning. And you will die terrified.

Houghton then went on to talk about the ammount of AI work that went into the Xeno, saying that is is a truly living, breathing, fluid creature that moves in ways that gamers have never seen before and that "I’ve never faced a scarier creature in a video game. Ever."

I'm sure your thinking well if this game is so damn terrifying and survival-horror based, what can I use to fight the Alien? Surley I have someting?

You do. A Motion tracker.

The only consistent tool you’ll have in “combating” the Alien’s advances will be a hand-held motion tracker. That’s it. And even within the pantheon of video game motion trackers, it’s hardly the most effective weapon of choice. It works on a two-tiered system. Large blocks at the edges of its display will light up when the Alien is on the move at a distance, but all they’ll really tell you is from which of four rough directions death is likely to be coming. No handy radar blip. Not even any indicator of distance.

There will be items to be crafted, however, much in the vein of Naughty Dog's gripping PlayStation 3 exclusive, The Last of Us, Houghton says:

There will be helpful equipment to find along the way, but in the tradition of the Nostromo crew’s desperate, bodged-together, homemade anti-Alien equipment, it looks like you’ll be wrangling tools rather than weapons. Along the course of our knuckle-clenching crawl through the station, we found multiple bits of scrap and a few sources of fuel for an--at the time--unavailable crafting system. Though few details are available at the moment, I’d bet real dollar-pounds on this bringing a limited array of misdirection and evasion tools into play by way of frantically salvaged raw materials

Who will you play as though? Ripley; but not the one you're thinking of. You'll be assuming the role of Amanda Ripley, the daughter briefly mentioned in the beginning of James Cameron's ALIENS Director's Cut; which struck as one of the saddest moments in that entire film, where Sigourney Weaver shows fantastic range in how awful she feels that she out-lived her only daughter...

You see the way that Alien: Isolation crafts its story and weaves Amanda into the Alien mythology just makes total sense. It’s 15 years after the Nostromo went nuclear and Ripley went missing. The ill-fated tug-boat’s black box has finally made its way back to civilisation, salvaged by the crew of a once prosperous but now dilapidated trading station. Amanda, having followed in her mother’s footsteps and joined the space corps, volunteers for the recovery mission.

 

Houghton spoke at great lengths regarding the sound design, level design, and aesthetics of the game that make it appear to be the most authentic ALIEN experience just short of actually flying into space and working on the Nostromo.

There is no set release date for ALIEN: Isolation yet; but there is actually gameplay and interviews with Creative Assembly and SEGA.

While I'd recommend being cautiously optimistic about this after the devastating pile of shit that was Aliens: Colonial Marines; it's hard not jump up and down at the thought that this franchise will finally live on in video-game form as a purely terrifying experience brought to life with accuracy, care, and respect for it's universe.

Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Fifteen years after the events of Alien™, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother's disappearance. As Amanda, you will navigate through an increasingly volatile world as you find yourself confronted on all sides by a panicked, desperate population and an unpredictable, ruthless Alien. Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive.