The Alien franchise is about uncaring monsters, unfeeling corporations, and horrific, claustrophobic terror. Given this setting, it almost made sense, what happened to the original Alien: Isolation.
The game was released to almost universally positive reviews, considered one of the best games ever made, and sold more than 2 million copies within its first few months. Despite this, Isolation only got “close to break-even or just about in the black,” then-Creative Assembly studio director Tim Heaton told GamesIndustry.biz a year after release. With the rapid evolution of AAA game development, that wasn’t enough. And so, like a salvage team diverted to a bio-weapon recovery mission, Isolation and its momentum were seemingly abandoned.
Gameplay and review accolades for Alien: Isolation, released 10 years ago today.
Abandoned, that is, until today, the 10th anniversary of that game’s 2014 release. The appropriately named Al Hope, creative director of Isolation studio Creative Assembly, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that his team had “heard your distress calls loud and clear,” and could confirm that “a sequel to Alien: Isolation is in early development.”
The original game stands out to this day for its bold yet entirely appropriate take on making an Alien game. You play as Amanda Ripley, daughter of iconic heroine Ellen Ripley, working for Weyland-Yutani in a welding job. You get a chance to find out more about what happened to your mother, but—you’ll never believe it—things go terribly wrong, and now you are hunted.
