The developers of Alien: Isolation have released a short video discussing the game’s “low-fi sci-fi” aesthetic and the reasoning behind it.

“The goal was that if we could understand [Ron Cobb]’s process, we could expand on the [Alien] universe while still remaining faithful to the true source” one of the developers said.

The visual look to the original Alien isn’t one modern movie-goers expect to see in their science fiction: “[it’s] a really grounded view of the future,” one without holograms and touch screens. “It’s chunky…this is a world of CRT, not LCD.” Creative Assembly are going out of their way to continue this look. In order to create the soft, fuzzy looking of the original Alien,they took gameplay footage and UI elements and recorded them onto VHS tapes, which they then played back through distorted cables.

This want to keep the “low-fi sci-fi” aesthetic is both an homage to the source material and a necessity for gameplay. “Take the motion tracker for example” one developer said. “It’s big and it’s heavy; you can’t hold it at the same time as a weapon. And all it does is tell you the movement of an object in a 2D plane…in a small cone in front of you.”

Alien: Isolation is a horror game that exists in a world of the future, but it’s also “a world where technology won’t save you.”

My Opinion

It occurred to me while I was watching these Creative Assembly developers talk that their heavy leanings on the source material are for noble reasons as apposed to Gearbox’s reasons, which were shallow and poor nostalgia grabs.

Gearbox wanted to recreate Hadley’s Hope in painstaking detail because, “wouldn’t that be cool?” forgetting the fact that Hadley’s Hope was blown to smithereens at the end of Aliens. Gearbox set out to create a shooter where you could be a “badass space marine,” forgetting the fact that Aliens existed to completely abolish that very trope.

The developers at Creative Assembly are doing the opposite. They aren’t recreating any one place but the entire universe Alien was set in. This isn’t a nostalgia grab but inspiration for gameplay that makes sense and will convey the fear they hope to create in their horror game.

They are doing everything right and I’m excited.