At Summer Game Fest Play Days, media and content creators got the chance to go hands-on with Alien Isolation 2. The big deal? Well, we know it’s real now. While the sequel to the claustrophobic, horror-filled Alien Isolation has long spun its own rumor mill, the SGF showcase served as the official reveal for players.
During Play Days, we went hands-on with the game’s opening section. But if that one section is indicative of what players can expect, this is going to be another crowd-pleaser. Developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA, Alien Isolation 2 captures exactly what makes the Alien franchise inherently terrifying: being alone.
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Building on the first game’s embrace of isolation, this sequel brings players face-to-face once more with horror’s signature alien killer: the Xenomorph. Alien Isolation 2 offers players more of the same gameplay, with additional interactive elements, a refined hiding system, and more agile movement.
Alien Isolation 2 offers players a brand-new setting, story, and protagonist—while still including the creeping dread of knowing you’re being hunted. While this sequel plans to offer players more narrative drive, our hands-on time showed it wasn’t letting go of its core survival-horror focus.
Creative Assembly’s Alien Isolation 2 is long-awaited, and so far, it’s paying off.
Leading up to our demo, we watched a video the developers prepared, highlighting the game’s background and, most importantly, that you can’t kill the Xenomorph. Put into small cubicles in a pitch-black space, press and content creators got to experience the fear in the most ideal environment. And the demo began.
Players start Alien: Isolation 2 on a remote, storm-ravaged colony world, navigating the elements to find a crashed ship. A voice sets the urgency of the moment as you’re introduced to the game. As you and your team try to check the ship for survivors and figure out why it crashed.
The demo opens with a brief tutorial on how to crouch, vault, sprint, and use your light. Throughout this, you are also well aware of how each of the things you just learned disrupts the environment enough to understand that how and when you move will be important in avoiding the Xenomorph.
Once you make your way to the ship, players get a sense of the environmental puzzles that prioritize searching and solving the prompts that the game puts in front of you. Then, you’re pushed under a counter, and the Alien enters. As before, the claustrophobic feeling is effectively exacerbated by the sound design. The sound of the Xenomorph’s footsteps, the way it echoes in the room, pushes you to pay attention to how sound tells you where the hunter is.
Using a form of a peak mechanic, you have to move past the Xenomorph by strategically choosing when to move, focusing on how the tables and ship structure can keep you hidden. It’s easy for your heart to race in the sequences. At times, it can feel like you’re just sitting and waiting, as you plan your next move, but the Alien’s movement is so incredibly menacing that the tension doesn’t drop.
Being alone in space is sci-fi horror’s biggest strength. The knowledge that if you mess up, you will die immediately heightens the tension, twisting your stomach into a knot. Alien Isolation 2 is good in the way a movie that makes you sleep with the light on is good. There is a beauty to the use of shadow and darkness in the game that horror fans will immediately celebrate.
On top of that, the player is expected to navigate the environment through tense exploration, especially since the environment itself is a puzzle as the Alien moves around you. The ability to peek around corners and over objects and places you’re using to shelter is key, and one of the game’s most refined elements. But when it really shines is when you look over a table and see the Alien in a hallway through a window. Somehow, the fact that it is still there even if it isn’t behind you is enough to keep you desperate.
Al Hope, Creative Director at Creative Assembly, previously said when the game was revealed, that the team was focused on creating an “Evolved Isolation experience continuing the legacy of the Alien franchise, making the eponymous killer smarter, the environment harsher and the chance of survival slimmer.”
With refined controls, Alien Isolation 2 feels meaner.
And from this one section of the game, the evolution from Alien Isolation is in full form. And that is no more experienced than when you die. The close-ups of the Xenomorph are so incredibly detailed that the dread it pushes erupts and can easily cause mistakes as you adjust and attempt again.
In the full game, players will navigate the planet’s surface and explore the claustrophobic confines of the Weyland-Yutani outpost of Kurosaki Station. Because the beginning of our demo shows the storming planet’s surface, we got a clear view of how dangerous it will be to be hunted there. In the little time we played, it was clear how much Alien Isolation 2 forces players to improvise and develop new tools, techniques, and tactics to survive.
It’s this last bit that works well to increase the meanness of the game. Alien Isolation 2’s controls are so refined when it comes to looking around corners, moving under objects, that when you do get caught, it feels meaner. Almost as if having better control with more refined movement mechanics highlights that yes, it’s your fault. And that makes the intensity of the situation mean more.
Alien Isolation 2 is simple at the outset, but as you try to stay alive, the atmosphere becomes suffocating, and finding the path forward feels almost impossible. The first time you die, the Xenomorph is terrifying, rendered with even greater fidelity than we have seen before. Even with just a little over 30 minutes in the game, Alien Isolation 2 is the dread-soaked tension that audiences have been waiting for.
