Above: In space, the androids will make you scream … in frustration.
Synthetics don’t like you, either
The only downside to the demo was how close its final act came to ruining my experience. After I turned the power back on in a control room, one of the dormant androids there (also known as synthetics) woke up. Its dead, soulless eyes and pale skin were enough to let me know that these guys aren’t friendly. You can try to attack it, but the robot will just catch your arm and punch you in the face.
I died, as expected, but when I continued from the last checkpoint, the station’s alarms were suddenly ringing and the android was about to choke the life out of me. It had to have been some kind of bug, because I felt like I was missing some crucial narrative beat, dialogue, or scene that would’ve bridged the moment before I died with this newfound hell I came back to.
A representative from publisher Sega later filled me in on the missing piece: Once you restore power, you have to start the evacuation procedure. If you can do this without the synthetic noticing you, you don’t have to kill it. But if you do get caught, it’s only supposed to chase you up until you leave (its orders are to keep the control room safe from looters). My android must have been extra aggressive, because it clearly followed me — by calmly walking, which made it more creepy — when I escaped.
However, with the station in panic mode, the other humans onboard were on high alert, too, so sprinting blindly into the darkness wasn’t the smartest idea. My first plan was to lure the android toward the other survivors, partly because I was curious if it’d work, and partly because I wanted revenge.
Above: The alien is always searching for new prey.
I thought I was scot-free because of the gunshots I heard, but when I turned a corner, a black tip emerged from my chest. The damn alien, who I completely forgot amid of all this madness, found me.
The next half-a-dozen tries at escaping ended in similar ways. At one point, I tried starting a three-way rumble between the alien, the android, and the humans, but that dream died a swift death when the survivors shot me through the locker I was hiding in.
Flustered, I asked someone from the dev team to help me out, and he guided me to the end of the demo.
Aside from that abrupt and frustrating finale, the hour I spent with Alien: Isolation was fraught with tension and scares. Toward the end, I was full-on paranoid, hiding under tables or crouching behind objects if I heard so much as a blip from my motion tracker — most of the time, the creature didn’t even show up. Those psychological tricks, plus the constant risks of pissing off one enemy group over another, wore me out, and I couldn’t wait to take a breather outside.