Alien: Isolation 2 Is Just as Frightening and Difficult as the First Game (Preview)

Twelve years. It’s been 12 years since the first Alien: Isolation released and blew everyone away with its unique brand of fear. No one who played the game was surprised that it ultimately became one of the best horror games of all time. Frankly, it still is till this day – but there’s also been a great deal of terrific survival horror games in the years since, particularly for the current generation of consoles. So it seems it’s now the right time to bring back the titular alien for another go around.

Creative Assembly officially unveiled Alien: Isolation 2 at Summer Game Fest this year, and not long after the reveal, I went hands-on with the sequel for about 20 minutes, experiencing the beginning of the upcoming game. I have to say that I’m a massive fan of the Alien movies and I loved the first Alien: Isolation game. Which means I had high expectations going into this first preview, even though I was only getting a small taste of what CA has been cooking up with Sega.

We don’t know a whole lot about Alien: Isolation 2 yet, but we do know that it’s set months after the first game and follows a new character named Blake, who is conducting a survey near Kurosaki Station along with two other Weyland-Yutani employees, when a ship crashes near them.

A major part of the sequel is exterior gameplay, given that the game begins and will presumably take place on a planet. Because of this, the first part of my hands-on session took place outside. It was dark, rainy, and eerie – similar in feeling to the area surrounding the colony in Aliens. Blake and the other employees search the downed ship for an entrance and board it, looking for survivors. But after a minute or two of gathering scraps to power the ship back on, a Xenomorph suddenly appears – and so begins Alien: Isolation 2.

For this brief demo, we were tasked with simply reaching the hatch and escaping the ship. You can’t imagine how difficult that was. I took maybe three different routes, twice dropping into the ducts underneath the floor and peering out for the alien before making a run for it. (Amateur tip: don’t do that. Don’t run; it’ll hear you, suddenly appear next to you, and probably impale you with its tail.) Each time I would move behind and under tables, using the environment to make myself small and undetectable. It worked, for the most part, but I still failed a few times.

Maybe I’m actually not that good at stealth games? All those years playing Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed, the original Alien: Isolation, and even games like A Plague Tale didn’t help me accomplish the simple feat of escaping the ship at the beginning of the game. But like most gamers: I appreciate a challenge and it made me enjoy the experience that much more. Otherwise, if it was too easy, if Creative Assembly decided to turn down the horror and difficulty in the sequel, that would’ve been disappointing.

There’s a lot of hope riding on this game, and based on the very, very brief snippet of gameplay, it looks like Alien: Isolation 2 is on the right track. The immersion – from the retro-futurism we’ve come to know from the Alien franchise, the incredible audio design, the frightening presence of the Xenomorph who could appear at any point, and even the lighting used throughout the environment – is there. It’s a promising start to what will hopefully be a great sequel.