As I stand on the lee side of the wrecked haz lab, all I can hear is the rain pelt its metal roof and the feral wind howl about me. Planet LV-921 may have a breathable atmosphere, but it's not a safe planet. And that's before the xenomorph enters the scene and starts hunting the colonists living in Weyland-Yutani's Kurasaki mining station.
Alien: Isolation 2, the long-awaited sequel to Creative Assembly's 2014 horror game, moves the action out from the original's claustrophobic Sevastopol Station, but the developers have worked out ways to make the wide open spaces of LV-921 feel just as tense and trapping.
My Alien: Isolation 2 demo fades up to reveal I'm sitting in the back of a gloomy rover, its worn vinyl seats lit in the orange glow of the CRT monitors and blinkenlights. Two colonists, Otto and Cole, bicker about the storm that's beginning to pick up outside, and there's a rocking motion to the rover's interior that tells of the wind's strength as much as the road's unfinished surface. After waiting 12 years for an Alien: Isolation sequel, the confidence on show and the familiarity of the scene makes it seem like the team rolled straight from making the first game into the second, still firing on all cylinders.
Cole slams on the brakes when he hears a roar overhead followed by an explosion that shakes the rover. Your character, Blake, newly arrived after an eight-month journey from Earth, announces we need to investigate the noise. Cole says we must be quick, the storm sounds bad now but it's only due to get worse.
The original Alien: Isolation constrained its action to the narrow corridors and restrictive rooms of a space station, so to be stood in an open, muddy forest speckled with dead trees is a marked departure. The rover's headlamps cast long shadows and pick up the pouring rain drops. In the distance, smoke and the glow of a large fire hints at the location of the explosion. While Cole and Otto will try to find a route to the site in the vehicle, I'm to make my way through the dead wood alone, armed only with a flashlight.
"The weather plays a big part of it," art director Ana Sopikova says of the differences between the original Alien: Isolation and its sequel. "The rain, the storm, the wind allow us to layer different gameplay experiences." This early in the game, the weather exists for atmosphere, but she tells me that later in the game I may "Go outside, and maybe the fog comes in and all of a sudden, you can't see more than a couple of metres in front of you. Or the rain starts, and it's really loud, and you can't hear your footsteps."
Though, principal environment artist Archie Whitehead points out that the same dampening of your senses will be happening for the alien: "It sees and it hears, it's not being fed secret information about where you are. The only thing to bear in mind with that is that it's really good at adapting. So if it can't hear you, it's going to try and find other ways to hunt you." He gives the example that it might get up high to a vantage point where it can better see you. Or, if it loses you in fog, it will be even more attuned to any noise you might make.
Blake's alone excep for some idle radio chatter and the sound of the rain thumping into the thick mud. She heaves herself up ledges and slips down channels of water cut into the soil. Through it all, the sounds of the approaching storm envelope me.
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