New previews for Alien: Isolation

[matt]

It seems like reporters had more time to sit down with the game and the previews I read are pretty positive:
Rock Paper Shotgun
Destructoid
Eurogamer

Most are purely positive, but Eurogamer touched on how my fears of frustration might be realized:

In broader gameplay terms, however, the game feels harder to gauge. During my time with the game, the unscripted nature of the Alien proved both liberating and problematic. The knowledge that it could appear at any time makes for some unique and memorable excursions through Sevastopol's painstakingly realised world, but also leads to a fair amount of trial and error. Or, in some cases, not even trial and error, since there's no guarantee that events will play out the same way twice. It took me several attempts to reach certain objectives, and while plenty of my failures can definitely be blamed on my own mistakes, there were others where it felt like I really had no chance... During particularly tricky sections, the monster sometimes felt less like an ominous threat, a Damoclean sword that could fall at any time, and more like a persistent nuisance to be worked around... yes, drive me up the wall with its punishing brutality and sporadic save points.

Destructoid goes into more detail about this "sporadic" save system:

Moreover, Isolation also uses a fixed save point system. Creative Assembly cited this as a design choice to get players to think about where they want to set their flag, but also to prevent players from taking advantage of checkpoints and save-anywhere options, which would mitigate the tension.

Really? No checkpoints? Grumble.... Sporadic save points seems to imply they are infrequent...They better have a SUPER easy mode for me...

I'm also not nuts about the looting and crafting stuff (mentioned in the Destructoid piece and was in the build I played as well) because I feel it hurts immersion, but maybe that's just me. In addition, the robots are outlined a bit better, and I'm not completely sold on them, but it doesn't seem like you'll be going around robot hunting fortunately.

The best quote award goes to Eurogamer with this:

It is, at its heart, an heir to the original source of all survival horror: Pac-Man. You're stuck in a maze with a monster that can only ever be avoided or temporarily stalled. The perspective is different, the visual style is completely opposite, but the core gameplay hook is the same: that primal pulse-pounding feeling of being relentlessly chased, hunted, stalked. It's just that the same systems that can make that sensation so utterly thrilling can also make it kind of frustrating when things don't go your way.

I never thought about Pac-Man as the original source of survival horror, but it's a very good point! They are ghosts after all. hahah

[RightClickSaveAs]

That sounds a lot more promising. I'm still skeptical about the claims of "emergent gameplay", I know pretty much all those articles said the Alien did behave like a monster rather than a scripted enemy, but I don't know how they can get the 14(15?)+ hours of gameplay they're claiming out of just hiding from a single enemy.

One thing I fixated on with the Rock Paper Shotgun article for some reason though was the mention of "70s tech". I love the idea of old fashioned takes on futuristic technology, and it looks like the game may deliver on that aspect. It's also what Routine is planning to do if/when that game comes out (the tech is more 80's in that case though).

[matt]

I think it probably is 15 hours because each setup takes 1 hour because you have to play it 30 times over because the alien keeps killing you. :-/