Alien Officially Unleashes an Even Deadlier Xenomorph

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

Alien: Isolation made hiding under a desk feel like a perfectly reasonable way to spend an evening. Creative Assembly’s 2014 survival horror game put players in control of Amanda Ripley, whose search for her mother brought her aboard Sevastopol station. The Xenomorph waiting there turned even a short trip through a corridor into something worth reconsidering.

More than a decade later, the sequel is moving that nightmare to a new location. Alien: Isolation 2 takes place on a storm-battered colony world, with the Weyland-Yutani outpost of Kurosaki Station providing another deeply unwelcoming destination. The change introduces outdoor environments alongside the cramped interiors that made the original so stressful.

Creative Assembly has now revealed that Alien: Isolation 2’s Xenomorph will hunt more aggressively outside and use the weather to conceal its movements. In a new developer Q&A, senior core gameplay designer Noelie Prost explained: “It will use the fact that exteriors are exposed to hunt you more aggressively. It will use weather to hide its movements.” Getting out of the building is therefore unlikely to provide the relief players might expect. The creature’s behavior also responds to the sequel’s expanded environments and equipment. The developers describe a hunter with additional things to learn, creating encounters that challenge players to reconsider tactics that previously worked. Familiarity with the first game may help with the nerves, but relying on the same escape plan could become a problem.

Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath
your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what
it would leave behind.

Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you
to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever
won that particular argument.

• Freddy is horror’s cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot
  guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever.
• You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your
  own head is where this does its damage.
• These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose
  because they are weak. They lose because they are tired.
• You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.

Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the
person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.

• Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you
  describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you.
• You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You
  know that feeling from real life too.
• The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you
  have met those adults.
• By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.

Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost
certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.

• Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be
  somebody who was at the party.
• You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the
  same way you watch films.
• The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are
  the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention.
• Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.

Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people
asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.

• The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary
  room that quietly stops feeling ordinary.
• Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than
  personal, which is rarer than it sounds.
• This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are
  the ones who are not alone and refuse to be.
• Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one
  standing in the hallway.

‘Alien: Isolation 2’ Makes the Outdoors Another Hunting Ground

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