Alien Isolation is my favourite horror game, but it’s too long and I think that opinion is near unanimous. When it feels like it’s drawing to an end it just keeps going, and its protracted runtime is exacerbated by the fact that it’s an unbearably tense experience. I adore this game, I swear I do, but boy could it have used a trim.
It turns out at least one member of the original dev team agrees. In a conversation with FRVR, Alien Isolation writer Dion Lay demonstrates that the outsize length of the game wasn’t deliberate at all: it was because the Xenomorph AI got way too good.
In Alien Isolation, the Xenomorph has more sophisticated AI than is still the norm in horror games. Whereas the indestructible stalking characters in Resident Evil tend to always behave the same, the Xenomorph can adapt to player behaviour and is thus a far more formidable opponent. It’s why Alien Isolation is still unmatched when it comes to cat-and-mouse style horror, but it also serves to make the player behave more carefully and thus, slowly.
In other words: a story that unfolded at a faster clip with less-sophisticated AI became much longer.
“The Alien really evolved as we were making it,” Lay said. “By the time it was perfect, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, everything takes a lot longer!’ So, it would be really nice to pare it down to its core, make it a lot shorter.”
Because the story was complete by the time the AI had reached that level of finesse, it was already too late to make dramatic changes to the script. “I think it would have been hard at the time to do that [cut it down] at the time,” Lay said. “Now, in a perfect world, yeah, I’d kind of shrink it down a bit, get down its core.” He goes on to say that “at the time, there was some stuff where we were like: ‘Yeah, we can’t take that out now, that would kind of upend everything.’”
While Alien Isolation was divisive when it launched in 2014, it’s nowadays—rightly—considered a modern classic. This celebration by Fraser Brown captures what’s so special about the game, which I am still too scared to revisit despite thinking about it on the regular. Creative Assembly announced a sequel in 2024, but there’s been no updates since.
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