spooky Archives -

Is This a Rescue Mission, or Another Bug Hunt?

One of the last scripts I wrote for the sadly-defunct TripleJump YouTube channel was a giant list ranking every single Alien and/or Predator video game ever made. Unfortunately, the channel went under before the video was released, but here’s a peek behind the curtain for you; Sega’s 2014 survival horror hit, Alien: Isolation, was at number one. However, despite heavily featuring the perfect organism in a starring role, Alien: Isolation isn’t a perfect game, but it is probably the closest a video game has come to perfectly capturing the atmosphere of the movie franchise upon which it’s based, Alien or otherwise.

This is Amanda Ripley. Her family line has pretty appalling luck when it comes to run-ins with predatory space bugs.

Creatively assembled by British studio, Creative Assembly, who are most well known for the Total War series and its combination of real-time battles and grand strategy, Alien: Isolation took the developers into unfamiliar territory. With very little experience in the survival horror genre, Creative Assembly made a host of outside hires, and soon enough a 100-strong team were orchestrating visceral encounters and crafting ’70s-style retro tech.

The crew were reportedly handed around three terabytes of production material from 20^th Century Fox, and through deconstructing this “gold mine” of information, they were able to build a startlingly authentic world that specifically recalled the atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s 1979 original. Stellar lighting and graphical effects, flawless sound design, and a talented cast of voice actors all combined with this vision to create one of the most atmospheric and genuine movie-to-game experiences ever seen.

For a game released in 2014, Alien: Isolation’s environments can look pretty insane. The character models are showing their age a bit though.

It’s pretty scary, too. For most of the game, the player character (Amanda Ripley, daughter of the legendary Ellen Ripley) is completely defenceless against the overwhelming speed, power, and bitey bits of the towering xenomorph, and will have to sneak around quietly, hiding in every available nook, cranny, or orifice in order to avoid a swift and gory demise. They even made it so that the alien can hear sounds that come through your mic, breaking the fourth wall in an unsettling manner and making it so that the hoot of an errant owl in your living room can spell death for poor old Amanda. I told you to keep that window shut.

As I already mentioned, though, this is not a perfect game. Progression can fall into a trial and error process at times, and clever players can work out the xenomorph’s AI, thus being able to manipulate the initially panic-inducing monstrosity into easily-avoidable loops. On the other end of that scale, less proficient players might find themselves constantly harassed by the chitinous terror’s perpetual presence, with observers noting that the xenomorph’s AI tends to be a little too adept at homing in on Miss Ripley even when it should logically be at the other end of the station, violently breaking and entering the cranium of some other defenceless schlub.

Can I tell you a secret? I haven’t finished this game. It’s just too long.

It’s at times like this when Alien: Isolation’s cloying horror can teeter on the verge of aggravation and annoyance, and players might find themselves desensitised to Amanda’s torso getting brutally severed by the xenomorph’s spiky tail after the fourteenth time in a row while fear turns to frustration and frustration turns to controller-throwing rage. All of this, along with long stretches of dealing with the less-interesting android enemies, means that Sega’s most beloved Alien adaptation can outstay its welcome a bit.

During its high points, though, Alien: Isolation is excellent – a stunning interpretation of the first film’s timeless atmosphere and an almost unbearably tense and trouser-ruining experience throughout. As the game celebrated its ten-year anniversary in October 2024, Creative Assembly employee and Alien: Isolation creative director, Al Hope, confirmed that the team are working on a follow-up, and if they iron out the annoyances that made Alien: Isolation fall just short of all-time great status, this follow-up has a chance to be the best sequel since Aliens.

The Seegson androids have more in common with Ash than Bishop. That’s a bad thing.

This article was written for the now-defunct Sega Force Mega as part of a planned Halloween special featuring lots of Sega-published Halloween-appropriate games, alongside The Ooze and Devilish. This is the last unpublished article I’d written for that magazine. I updated the intro to reflect the fact that TripleJump are also now defunct.

Man (and Truck) vs. Nature (and Ghosts)

Have you ever been driving at night through country lanes? Cowering behind the wheel from looming, pale branches and convinced of glowing eyes watching from hedgerows? Have you ever seen hunched figures in the distance only to realise it was actually a road sign, or been shocked by the sudden emergence of a wayward owl? SnowRunner has that feeling in spades. I mean, I haven’t noticed any owls, but there are definitely glowing eyes watching from the undergrowth.

If I was writing a script for a YouTube video about non-horror games that have spooky bits in them, SnowRunner would be on it. The aforementioned glowing eyes are the obvious example, but there’s other stuff too, like spooky singing coming from abandoned churches, abandoned villages that are apparently irradiated, and just a general feeling of isolated creepiness once the sun disappears behind that distant ridge of trees.

You want me to go that way, eh? Should I trust this fellow?

There are also trucks in it, big trucks. That’s what the MudRunner/SnowRunner/Spintires games are, by the way; slide into the driver’s seat of a massive truck with vast tyres and chunky metal bits, and smash it into nature. Take on a task, like delivering cargo or finding a broken down truck in the wilderness, and face puddles of sticky mud, fallen trees, swamps, muck, rocks, and dangerous slopes as you try to get from A to B. You will get stuck, but with careful use of your winch, gears, variable tyre pressures, and possibly other vehicles in your fleet, you’ll get satisfyingly unstuck and be able to move on to the next helping of nigh-impassable terrain.

Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is, at the time of writing, the most recent title in the franchise, and eschews the “odd-job guy in rural, isolated locations” feel in favour of an “adventurous type in the literal middle of nowhere” kind of vibe. Most of the massive hardware is gone, with a new focus on “scout” type vehicles, there are no towns, paved roads, or permanent residences around, the player can make use of a drone to scout out the landscape, and most of the missions will be quests of discovery, looking for dinosaur bones or evidence of prehistoric civilisations.

That’s where this game’s weirdness comes in. I’ve not gotten too far yet, but Expeditions: A MudRunner Game feels even more isolated than its predecessors, and many of the missions will send you searching for little statues of odd-looking fellows that seem to point out the direction of safe routes. This paints them in a benevolent light, but they still strike me as kind of creepy. Also, the ones in the desert levels have oars. What are they doing with oars in deserts, eh? Something to do with the large, abundant rivers nearby, you say? A likely story.

I was doing okay until you lot stuck your oar in.

I got lost in Expeditions: A MudRunner Game at first, and I don’t just mean I rolled my truck down a ravine and didn’t know the way back to base. The missions aren’t clear, the controls take some getting used to, and the menus aren’t the most intuitive. I was lost at the beginning of SnowRunner, too, but it wasn’t long before I got out of first gear. The same thing happened here, and I was soon charging up rocky hillsides with wild abandon, and only toppling back down again about half the time.

Expeditions: A MudRunner Game is for those players who preferred the exploration and scouting aspect of SnowRunner and MudRunner, but I must admit that I was mostly happiest when I was hauling cargo along a busted up road with gigantic, muddy swamps along the way, so Expeditions doesn’t scratch that same itch. It’s still kind of spooky though, and I’ve seen posts online about ghosts and bears and UFOs, so who knows what I’ve yet to uncover. I’ll let you know if I find anything in the wilds.

Just what else could be out there?

Played on PS5