After months of people knowing about its existence, Sega has officially unveiled its next attempt to turn the Alien films into a game that is not terrible. Titled Alien: Isolation and in development at The Creative Assembly, a British studio best known for large-scale strategy games like Total War, the new game takes inspiration from Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien. So it aspires to be something other than a xenomorph shooting gallery like 2013’s noxious Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Instead, Isolation will be all about isolation. Set 15 years after the original film, it stars Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, who is working for the ever-present, ever-shadowy Weyland-Yutani corporation and struggles with the questions surrounding her mother’s disappearance. A man, who so totally doesn’t have a malevolent agenda, tells Amanda that the blackbox from her mother's missing ship has been found, and Amanda heads for a predictably abandoned and spooky space station to find the truth. There she meets—according to the developer—the biggest, nastiest Alien alien that video games have ever seen, who mercilessly stalks her as she searches for answers.
Isolation seems like the logical zenith of the first-person horror trend that has swept through the games scene over the last few years, hitting many of the same notes as genre pillars Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender, which themselves were clearly inspired by Alien’s hide-and-seek horror. Amanda is mostly helpless and armed only with her trusty motion tracker. She’ll be forced to run and hide from her pursuer, who is mostly a lethal nuisance, filling every moment of the adventure with dread but only occasionally popping up to put a damper on her puzzle-solving. Alien: Isolation is set to be released on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360, and Xbox One in “late 2014.” [via Joystiq, PlayStation Access]