If other games turn out poorly, then I do think that makes Neverending Nightmares by comparison.
I spend some time here and there advising on kickstarters and various game design tips. Hmm... Maybe I should stop because they are the competition.
F2P is a weird, weird, thing. I am ashamed to say that during and after Retro/Grade, I worked on a F2P game - Dino Park (Android) and National Geographic's Dino Land (iOS). It's the same basic game, but the iOS version is much more polished. The monetization (particularly on the iOS version) is terrible. When I originally designed it, I wanted to create a game that was enjoyable for free, but you could pay as much as you want for it. That in and of itself doesn't seem too evil. Unfortunately, a producer game in and made it a terrible money grab, which I felt pretty sick about. You reach a paywall like 30 seconds in the game. His argument was that you are either going to pay for the game or you aren't, and we might as well filter out users that aren't going to pay. I don't really think that's how F2P works... The free players help build awareness, and it's usually a small percentage that actually pays the bills.
While the game turned out terrible, there are some upsides. We used the money we made from that to fund Neverending Nightmares up until the kickstarter. The tech was nice, and it's what we built Neverending Nightmares off of. The animaion system is probably the coolest bit of tech that we carried over.
I'm not sure F2P definitely equates to evil. Valve had a really interesting talk at Steam Dev Days about how the monetize TF2 and DotA, and it works quite well for them. The problem is that I imagine you need to foot the bill for the backend on a huge number of users, which I'm sure makes sense if you have a hugely popular game, but if you are tiny, it might be daunting to run a backend for all those free users. (I don't think we ever had any users for Dino Park/Land, so we didn't have to worry about that. haha)
My buddy Rob Jagnow is doing a very interesting F2P game
Extrasolar that seems reasonable about monetization. Personally, I don't think I'd ever want to work in F2P again. I don't want to think about monetization when making the game, which I think you are pretty much stuck with no matter what when working in F2P.
*EDIT* Bringing the conversation back to Alien: Isolation it looks like they are currently showing the game at EGX Rezzed. Any UK backers attending who can report back what it was like?
It's possible they may show at PAX Prime, but I probably won't have time to check it out since I'll be busy showing Neverending Nightmares.