Summary
Lately it seems as if multiple games have been announced or released as licensed adaptations inspired byAlienandAliens. There’s a subtle yet important distinction between those two movies, being that the former translates well as a claustrophobic and helpless survival horror tale while the latter is more of an epic action movie. Recentgames likeAliens: Fireteam EliteandAliens: Dark Descentare obviously heavily inspired by the latter, and meanwhile it’s been a long and deflating wait for anything remotely close to what the former has delivered in terms of inspiration, such as Creative Assembly and Sega’sAlien: Isolation.
Alien: Isolationstuck to its licensed source material as much as any otherAlienorAliensgame, but it did so in a remarkable way by being part epilogue and part prologue sandwiched betweenAlienandAliens. Much of the game’s appeal had to do with its atmospheric stealth gameplay, however. As Ripley’s daughter, players have a startlingly low number of resources at their disposal as they navigate around hostile androids and, of course, the Xenomorph threat. But while those encounters are frightening enough as it is,Alien: Isolationalso understands the singular enemy that makes the franchise most terrifying is a facehugger.
Nothing is Scarier in the Alien IP Than Facehuggers
The threats posed inAlien: Isolationalone are awful and grotesque, let alone intheAliensfranchiseas a whole.Androidsmimicking and mocking a sense of cordial, courteous humanity are relentlessly oppressive, for instance, and the cold dead space players are stranded in, aboard a dilapidated metal husk, is less than inviting.
Even when nothing triggersAlien: Isolation’s motion tracker the game is highly suspenseful while maneuvering tight, winding corridors and even tighter ventilation ducts.Xenomorphs areAlien: Isolation’s apex, omnipotent threat, pursuing players often throughout the game after they are gradually introduced and make up most of what stealth gameplay amounts to with players ducking into cabinets or under desktops.
There are minimal ways to keepXenomorphsat bay—an abundance of flamethrower fuel can keep players feeling confident in their ability to traverse freely—but the frequency at which the Xenomorph appears can eventually wear out the gimmick of its RNG and as it patrols it can be more frustrating than scary to find a moment to exit from a discrete hiding spot. Facehuggers, on the other hand, are a much more minor threat inAlien: Isolationdue to simply not being around as much.
Their infrequency heightens their horror, though, as players encounter a slimy nest packed with hatched and unhatched eggs and know precisely what they’ve walked into.Facehuggersare arguably the scariest piece of theAliensci-fi lorepurely because of their abhorrent appearance as an invasive parasitoid with gnarly fingers as appendages that ensnare a human victim’s head to latch itself onto their face and implant a Chestburster embryo in their stomach via their throat.
The facehugger dies after achieving this goal, but knowing the horror it is capable of and how it sneakily scuttles and leaps at victims makes it far more terrifying than a Xenomorph.
Fede Alvarez’sAlien: Romulusunderstands this, too, with its reveal teaser dedicating multiple shots to a group of facehuggers pursuing and lunging at the crew. An additional shot even grossly depicts a facehugger’s removal from a victim’s face and throat to succinctly set the tone for how repulsive the movie’s body horror will rightfully be.
An Alien: Isolation 2 Would Need to Double Down on Facehuggers
BecauseanAlien: Isolation 2hasn’t happened yetits fate may already be sealed. Rather, that’s not to say there could never be another survival horrorAliengame, and anything in the vein of a spiritual successor toAlien: Isolationwould need to have a solid grasp of its strengths and weaknesses when considering its own.
Making facehuggers a prominent enemy type would be a mistake because it could jeopardize how rare and gruesome they can be, for instance. Indeed,Alien: Isolationis much longer than it needed to be and could have debatably shaved a handful of hours off its experience to distill it further. A spiritual successor shouldn’t strive to be nearly as long, but either way it needs to respect facehuggers as a sinister threat and know exactly when to employ them to make them the scariest.
Alien: Isolationwithheld facehuggers until all other threats had become commonplace, and a spiritual successor couldn’t simply repeat that approach and call it a day. Perhaps making a newAlien: Isolationa third-person survival horror game could give it the edge it needs. Instead of a first-person glimpse of the facehugger leaping at the player and latching splayed onto the screen, a third-person glimpse could show the protagonist writhing in a panic to free the facehugger from their head before inevitably falling unconscious.
Like Xenomorphs, facehuggers’ blood is acidic and could also be implemented further as a way to retaliate against a player’s defensive attack. Nonetheless, thesheer hideousness of a facehuggercompared to a Xenomorph’s raw power makes it an enemy that survival horror takes on the franchise must continue to feature; at the absolute least, facehuggers and their Ovomorphs should always serve as a blood-curdling warning that players have stepped into the worst nightmare scenario imaginable.
Alien: Isolation
WHERE TO PLAY
Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger. Fifteen years after the events of Alien™, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda enters a desperate battle for survival, on a mission to unravel the truth behind her mother’s disappearance.As Amanda, you will navigate through an increasingly volatile world as you find yourself confronted on all sides by a panicked, desperate population and an unpredictable, ruthless Alien.Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive.
